The poorly handled relationship between Loh Kiwan and Marie is a highlight that takes away from the otherwise excellent film.
The film is adapted from the novel I Met Loh Kiwan by writer Cho Hae Jin, telling the story of a North Korean refugee in Belgium.
While waiting for the local authorities to confirm his identity, he goes through a journey that tests human endurance. Where love and loss meet, comforting each other in the cold cage of the world.
More than two hours of film is probably too little to convey all the tragedies of existence, especially existence as a human being who wants to live a human life. Therefore, the film should have become a promising work but in the end it stumbled on its own feet.
Loh Kiwan presents a character who lacks a homeland. The old country cannot be returned to. The new land is not accepted.
He is lost in modern Western society, a society torn between the ideal of universal charity and the burden of foreign immigrants.
My Name is Loh Kiwan | Official Trailer | Netflix
My name is Loh Kiwan, divided into two parts. Sometimes memories overlap with reality. Loh Kiwan came to Belgium but had to live in hiding, not daring to cause trouble with the locals because he was well aware that he had no citizenship.
In other words, his existence was not recognized. He was just a ghost wandering, running away, hiding. He was bullied, cheated, tortured, his shoes were thrown into the lake in the middle of winter...
One by one, people denied him. Even the administrative apparatus denied him. His fellow countrymen also denied him.
Moving on to the second part, the turning point in Loh Kiwan's life, when he meets a rebellious girl named Marie. Her mother and father are both of Korean descent, she is a strong woman but has let her life slip away due to past traumas.
The reunion between Marie and Loh Kiwan saved the lives of two people who were at rock bottom. The fallen lady and the miserable, kind-hearted young man are not new relationships in art. Therefore, My Name is Loh Kiwan , although it is the most popular, also received reviews that the film is not really excellent.
Song Joong Ki as Loh Kiwan
Where is your hometown?
The second half of the film lost the momentum that the first half had built up. Although "after the rain the sky clears", here the sky clears... too quickly, leaving the audience a bit disappointed.
The love scenes when two suffering people accept to step into each other's lives are also stereotyped and not as impressive as they should be. The conflicts and contradictions are pushed too big, so the easy ending is also unconvincing.
Before Loh Kiwan arrived in Belgium, he lived a life of fugitive living illegally with his mother.
During a chase, Loh Kiwan's mother was involved in a traffic accident and died. In the middle of a winter night, on a deserted street, Kiwan brought a pot of boiling water to the spot where his mother had died and sat there scrubbing away the blood that was still stuck to the road.
Seeing the image of blood mixed with hot water flowing down the drain, the fragility of this body, the mediocrity of human life is so heartbreaking.
Loh Kiwan is a Kafkaesque character, who ventures into a strange, uncertain, irrational world, facing forces that deliberately exclude him from life, standing before cold, rational bureaucratic courts that lack the ability to empathize and understand. Human existence must rely on evidence and witnesses.
The absurdity of life pursues to the end of the film, when Kiwan gets a residence permit after many public and covert challenges.
At the airport, he chose to buy a one-way ticket to leave the country he had so hard to stay in. Because in the end, he realized that his homeland would be wherever the person he loved lived.
My Name Loh Kiwan can hold the audience with such details. It also shows the fate of immigrants, the harsh journey they have to go through before finding their own place in the new society.
In a world that is declared to be "flat" how much acceptance can people everywhere have?
Song Joong Ki really "transformed" with the role of Loh Kiwan
My name is Loh Kiwan and I am successful in some ways.
It shows Song Joong Ki breaking away from the image of a rich and glamorous handsome man in TV dramas to become a person pushed to the bottom, having to secretly eat in public toilets and rummage through trash cans to survive.
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