Peppermint Candy is a 2000 Korean film that chronicles the life of Park Yong-Ho backwards in five episodes, starting at his suicide. What I was most interested in the film was sympathy: Do we sympathise with Yong-Ho from the start of the movie? Why; what techniques does the director use? Or do we gain sympathy as time rewinds?...
In my experience of the movie, I found it immediately difficult to sympathise with Yong-Ho. Peppermint Candy opens with optimistic music and a party scene of old friends reuniting by a beautiful river. The tone is light, and I am excited about what looks like a movie that doesn't make me tear up at the end (for once). We are quickly introduced to Yong-Ho, however, and things shift. Yong-Ho is erratic and crazed-looking, physically (represented by framing) and mentally separated from the partying group. A sense of frustration is presented: we long to sympathise with the fun, light-heartedness of the group of old friends, but it is evident that Yong-Ho is the main character that we should be feeling for--or who we know we will inevitably end up sympathising with. I felt a vague selfish sense of doom knowing that my main characters weren't going to be the fun party-goers, but the misfit Yong-Ho...
As time rewinds, things start to change. Slowly we are taken through episodes of Yong-Ho's life. The tear-jerking scene in which he returns the peppermints to his ex-love, Sunim, does get us to shed a tear for Yong-Ho, but this doesn't last long (at least for me). Yong-Ho can be brutally cold to his love interests (perhaps one of the coldest and most detached sex scenes I've ever seen in the car...), abusive toward fluffy dogs, and generally cold and unsmiling. It is the long stretch in the middle of the movie where I find it most difficult to feel for Yong-Ho: in the end his life is tragic, and in the beginning he is nice, making it easier to feel for him--but in the long middle he is simply bitter and frustrating.
As we approach the end of the movie (and the chronological beginning of the story), Yong-Ho has regained all of his old charm and friendliness and zeal. Now is when we can fully sympathise with him: at the end! In "normal" movies, we build up sympathy by getting to know the main character's "good side," so that when disaster strikes we are cheering them on. It is not so in Peppermint Candy and so emotions are confused...(but I still teared up at the end)...
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