A Moment to Remember

Cast
Kim Su-Jin: Son Ye-Jin (The Classic, Lover’s Concerto)
Choi Chul-Soo: Jung Woo-Sung (Musa)

Review (Contains spoilers!)
As my memory disappears, my soul will disappear too…
What is most important to one’s existence? Some might say that it is power and wealth, others love and friendship. ‘A Moment to Remember’ suggests that the answer is far simpler but no less profound. While all the above are tangibles that many of us seek after in life and no doubt increase our appreciation of life, it is our experiences that really shape who we are. Sometimes in working to achieve some of our goals in life, we lose track of who we are and what is really important to us. Ultimately, our memories are the only things that we can really claim to own and the movie teaches us a very important lesson in treasuring our memories. The concept behind the movie is simple enough. It involves a couple falling in love and then being painfully wrenched apart through a tragedy, in this case with the female lead contracting Alzheimer’s disease. Such plots are common-fare for plenty of Korean melodramas. Yet what really distinguishes this movie from others of its genre that were released in 2004 is how the story really flows and engages the audience. The director does not try to be over-dramatic, which usually results in a dragged-out and boring plot, and the leads put in really brilliant performances that identifies with the audience.

The movie begins with Kim Su-Jin, a 27 year old fashion designer, being spurned at the train station by her lover, a colleague who is also a married man. Depressed, she goes to a convenience store where she bumps into a tall handsome man with whom she has a slight misunderstanding. Following that, she returns home and receiving the forgiveness of her father, decides to start life afresh. One day while accompanying her father, who is the head of a construction site, in making his rounds, she coincidentally meets the man whom she earlier bumped into at the convenience store. He is Choi Chul-Soo, the construction site’s foreman who is also aiming to become an architect. Chul-Soo may appear like a rough and dirty construction worker initially, but he does exude sheer masculinity in its most basic physical form and is pretty handy when it comes to carpentry or house repairs. Su-Jin instantly takes a liking to Chul-Soo and in what is a refreshing change, actively courts Chul-Soo. There are many sweet events that take place in the event of their courtship which eventually lead to their marriage. From here though, things quickly go downhill. Su-Jin soon finds that she has contracted Alzheimer’s disease and the rest of the movie depicts how she slowly and painfully loses bits of her memory until she totally cannot remember anything. Even more painful is seeing Chul-Soo agonise while watching the wife he loves dearly forget even who he is. The ending is bittersweet one but at least offers a glimpse of hope.

To forget easily is a gift…
Another important them touched upon in the movie is that of forgiveness. Through the course of the movie, there are two major acts of forgiveness. The first is when Su-Jin’s father forgives her for her attempted elopement with a married man, bearing in mind that such an action is considered to be very shameful in Asian culture. The second is when she then persuades and helps Chul-Soo to forgive his mother who abandoned him when he was just a child and who initially hates him to the core. It is ironic that in a movie where the tragedy involves the female lead losing her memory, it is suggested that being able to forget is a gift. However, I think it ties in very well with the main theme of treasuring our memories. Since our memories and experiences shape our outlook on life, why let it be filled with negative things? While we have to draw lessons from our negative experiences, we should not let it cloud our emotions. Rather, we should treasure the moments that inspire and touch us. Our lives are only so short and limited and we should make the best of whatever is given to us. As Su-Jin says to Chul-Soo in the movie:
‘Forgiving… is giving your hate just a little room in your heart’.
We might find it hard to completely eliminate the hatred in our hearts, but we should never let it control us.

I have an eraser in my head…
After what is a really cute and sweet period of courtship between the two leads, it is painful to see them being cruelly torn apart by fate. The way Su-Jin loses her memory slowly and gradually is probably one of the most painful tragedies I have watched on film. It is one thing for a death to occur in a melodrama, but this I feel is far more tragic. Just imagine seeing someone who is alive and standing right before your eyes, and yet knowing that that someone is not really there, not really ‘alive’. The actress who portrays Su-Jin does a very good job portraying this gradual memory loss as she innocently carries on life as she knows it without the slightest clue on what she has lost. She even forgets she has a husband and goes back to her old lover, the only love she is able to remember. The sense of helplessness is brilliantly portrayed in that we as the audience know that Su-Jin is losing her memory, and yet she herself does not know it and thus cannot do anything about it. The actor who portrays Chul-Soo also does a good job showing the inner pain that his character feels. Despite his grief, he has to put up a brave front and continue to interact with the woman he loves as though nothing has happened. Indeed, when seeing Su-Jin talking about her old lover intimately, he questions who the true love of her life is.

Is this heaven?
While this movie does not earn many points for originality, it succeeds in that is a very simple story told very well. It also offers some very important points for us to ponder as highlighted above. The concept of a person contracting Alzheimer’s disease and slowly forgetting everything may seem very distant in our lives, but yet it is exactly what is happening to many of us. Is there that touching incident in your life that you remember happening sometime in the past but cannot quite recall the details? Is there that person whom you got on really well with before but cannot quite recall the name now? There are certainly plenty of empty blanks in our memory now that might prove elusive to fill, but it is vital that we try to hold on to what we can, least we come to regret it in future. Overall, while ‘A Moment to Remember’ is generally a typical melodrama, it differentiates itself well enough from others in its genre well enough and is a good movie in its own right.