Family Ties (Tae-yong Kim, 2006)

Three stories:

1. A woman's ne'er-do-well brother suddenly turns up with his new, heretofore unknown middle-aged wife, and they're soon joined by the wife's ex-husband's ex-wife's little daughter.
2. A girl working as a Japanese-language tour guide dreams of escaping Korea and thereby putting some distance between herself and her dying, married-boyfriend-having mom.
3. A teenage guy is angry at his on-again off-again girlfriend for being such a skank.

* * *

This movie's Korean title translates directly to something like "Family Birth", which will make more sense when I tell you that the seemingly disparate threads listen above converge in the creation of a single family. (Spoilers, maybe? I'm not sure.) Why the KOFIC chose to distribute it in Anglophone markets under the same name as a 1980s sitcom remains an unanswerable question.

As in The Coachman, there are East Asian cultural issues in play here that wouldn't immediately resonate to us unmoored, lassiez-faire U.S. viewers. Where the earlier film took on family obligation, Family Ties takes on family composition, specifically the tricky issue of building a family based on something other than shared DNA. If you're like me and have seen every single episode of Something So Right, you don't think that's particularly unusual, but evidently the subject of the unconventional family — or, if you want to use the worst phrase in the world, "blended family" — isn't much discussed over in Korea.

Sometimes people ask me why I watch a lot of foreign films. My first reason is that foreignness acts as chat I call a "crap filter": the worst foreign movies will barely make inroads in their own country, let alone get all the way to the United States, so there's an upward quality bias already present in the selection of foreign movies available here. (Time filters crap as well as distance: bad movies don't endure the decades. For the most stringent crap filter, you're going to want to go old and foreign. So bear that in mind the next time you meet someone who only watches films from long ago and far away. It might not be snobbery; it just might be a cranked-up crap filter. The extent to which those two differ is up for debate.) My second reason is that foreignness, that is, being the product of another culture, adds all sorts of fascinating nuance to stories that may or may not have engaged me otherwise.

Family Ties is a decent example of that second reason vindicated. At its core, it's the story of how a family forms through a series of actions not directly intended to create one. Every character has their own obsessions and psychodramas, but a select number of them unite, in a roundabout fashion, in the end. Watching the way this happens is engaging enough, but the fact of the matter is that I'm just as drawn in — maybe even more so — by the unfamiliar setting, the not-particularly-familiar customs, the distinct aesthetic sensibility — it doesn't hurt that Korean films are generally wonderfully shot — and the getting-more-familiar-with-time language. Some complain about pictures from a different time and/or place, claiming that the unfamiliariarity of culture, custom, and convention alienates them to such an extent that they can't invest in the narrative. On one hand, I understand that, but on the other hand, I feel exactly the opposite: a so-so story set in Northridge might well draw me in if transplanted to, say, Morocco. Don't make me quote Terence again.