daisy (2006, korean movie) identified as an urban melodrama, the subject of the movie is a love triangle with classic touches: a beautiful young heroine who is a gifted painter; an unlikely hero who is an assassin-for-hire; and an interpol police who isn't particularly looking for love.
the heroine is all of twenty-three or twenty-four. she lives with her aging grandfather in a charming townhouse-cum-shop where she and her grandpa sell her paintings and other artistic odds and ends. in addition there is a wonderful studio where she paints when she is not outside doing plein aire work. oh la, a setting just ripe for romance.
and indeed romance is waiting in the wings. one day on one of her plein aire painting excursion in a particularly comely landscape of a flower filled field bordered by a meandering stream, she is seen at her art by a man sitting on the porch of his house surveying the scenery. in attempting to cross a stream using the lone log that has been thrown across it to serve as a bridge, she encounters a mishap, looses her balance and falls into the stream below. she is able to recover her sketch book but alas is separated from her bag of painting supplies. the man on the porch is too late to offer any assistance to our heroine in her distress but he does recover her bag from the stream and builds a proper bridge so the possibility of an event such as the one he witnessed will not be repeated our fair heroine. on her next outing to the spot, she avoids the stream to get to her particular painting spot. it is only after she arrives at the spot that she discovers the bridge and her satchel with painting supplies. finding her satchel she is not sure if the bridge had been built especially for her. regardless of this uncertainty, she decides to thank whomever had placed her satchel on the bridge with the painting of the field by the bridge. in the spot where her satchel had been hung on the bridge waiting for her, she places her painting of the field as a gesture of gratitude.
thus it is romance comes tiptoeing into her life. she is baffled by the daily delivery of potted daisies which begins after her gift of her painting. the subject of her painting was a daisy covered field. she is moved by this gesture and also mystified. why is the sender refusing to introduce himself to her? why does he prefer to remain unknown? this mystery piques our heroine and serves as a further goad to the viewer who is already inundated from movie's opening scenes
already drenched quite heavily with romantic feelings. the viewer knows who is sending the flowers to the heroine. the lovelorn swain behind these gifts is the man who had seen our heroines adventures on the log bridge, her subsequent fall, and received her gesture of thanks in the painting of the field she had hung for him on the bridge he had built for her. it turns out
he is an assassin-for-hire who works for some sort of hong kong crime syndicate. not really sure what drives a person to becoming a professional murderer. you need to train with a gun. have stomach and nerves of steel. and not particularly care to live.
since the movie utilizes voice-over narration the viewer is made to understand the events unfolding are primarily from his perspective. but our heroine doesn't know who the sender is. our lover is a classic anti-hero - a good mishmash of admirable traits and horrifying predilections. a murderer-for-hire, he nonetheless has a heart of gold, a quivering aesthetic sensitive and appreciative of the landscapes and floral paintings our heroine churns out, and is literate to boot. he not only speaks korean and mandarin he can also read german. add to that an attractive physical appearance and a capacity to give his life for love we have a very cunning specimen of an anti-hero.
moody, observing the heroine as she spends her days in a plaza earning money by painting people's portraits in between assignments, the viewer gets a full stomach full of melancholy, wistfulness. he is the watcher, observing his love as she paints, and chats and dozes and sips coffee, from the window of an apartment he selected because it is especially well suited to watching her, he is in control of their relationship. he cannot afford to interact with her. to do so would mean endangering both their lives. so he satisfies himself with watching her and
sending her potted daisies from the bed of daisies he raises on the deck of the riverboat in which he lives.
the elements in the story are nothing if they are not picturesque. the sweet quaintness is effective in heightening the distortion from a storyline we would expect from such a setting. the movie gains momentum with the arrival of the third figure in the love triangle. an interpol officer participating in an operation to stop a drug trafficking ring, he finds himself standing in front of our heroine on one of his data gathering sorties. on their first encounter, he happens to be holding a pot of daisies. he had grabbed it deflect attention from his investigations but the painter has her own life. in her life, potted daisies, the bridge are part of a romance. with the appearance of the interpol officer in front of her one day holding a pot of daisies, she comes to the only conclusion a young woman in her situation can come to - the man standing in front of her is the same man who built the bridge for her, the man who accepted her painting, the man who sent her potted daisies whenever the daisies in the previous pot start to decay.
the interpol officer is flattered by the obvious attention of the painter. since the painter is quite attractive, he initiates a relationship. even though he later comes to find out the reason for her initial interest, he never corrects her misunderstanding. even though the interpol officer is used to represent all that is honorable as a law-abiding citizen, in two very important things he fails. he uses the painter as a cover for his undercover drug bust operation which ends in a shootout wherein she loses her voice. instead of dealing with this responsibly, he avoids her because he cannot face the fact that it through his actions that this happens. he lies to her about the flowers.
we discover, as we watch the movie unfold, our anti-hero doing things typically performed by the hero. he protects his love. he is willing to allow the painter and the interpol police officer to live their lives. but things go terribly out of hand as they tend to in this sort of situations. the climax and conclusion of the movie continue and finish the intentions of the director in providing to the viewer a particular experience.
the actors are all effective at enacting their roles. the feeling of the cities with its antique buildings and plazas, the bucolic serenity of the countrysides with their meandering streams and flower-bedecked fields create a suitable canvas for the frolic of the movie's characters. seemingly a charming european idyll, picturesque, quaint, sweet, viewers are treated to some interesting what-ifs that i can only imagine would please those appreciative of dramas of this genre. viewers enjoy all the pleasures and thrills that a plot such as this promises. the setting for the movie, the netherlands, is caught in expert cinematography to further enhance the viewer's experience of bittersweet melancholy. indeed if a medieval psychic were consulted he would say that the humor that this movie panders to is melancholia. and melancholia, the humor, is associated with imbalance of perhaps the liver or gall bladder. but whichever organ it is associated with, this movie serves up a dish that is sweetened by love, made piquant from a love story gone awry, spiked with a fiery undercurrent from the inevitable conclusion.
i walked away from this movie with an appreciation for how a movie generates physical sensations and emotions in me as i watch. i understood how each gesture and smallest aspect of a movie is a carefully orchestrated event designed to achieve an effect in the viewer. this physical and mental experience is different from any messages that those involved in the creation of the movie may have. for me watching a movie then is about the physical and emotional experience, along with a storyline, and other messages that might be embedded in it.
