A Good Lawyer’s Wife - aka Baramnan Gajok (2003) - Director Im Sang-su is well-known for his previous films “Girls’ Night Out (1999)” and “Tears (2001)”. Invited to the main competition section at the Venice International Film Festival, where it screened to generally favorable reviews, his latest feature “A Good Lawyer’s Wife” hit the Korean audiences again with a poignant perspective on the relations between sex and the family. This is a story of a family: a lawyer, his housewife, their adopted seven-year old son and the husband’s old parents. Both couples no longer have a normal sex life. Yeong-jak, the husband in his 30s, is a perfect husband except that he cannot give pleasure to his wife, Ho-jeong (played by Venice Film Festival Award winner Moon So-ri.) His father, Chang-geun, who is an alcoholic and ill with liver cancer, has been unable to have sex with his wife, Byeong-han for the past 15 years. However, each of them finds a way out of their unsatisfying sex life. Yeong-jak has an affair with a very young girl while Ho-jeong secretly has an affair with a teenage neighbor. Meanwhile the old mother, Byeong-han, has an affair with an old friend from elementary school. When her husband finally passes away, Byeong-han announces her intention to marry her lover. Ho-jeong supports her mother-in-law’s honest decision. Unlike many other movies that describe extramarital affairs as an immoral or vain matter, “A Good Lawyer’s Wife” blatantly ridicules the morality forced on a family, throwing a question to true morality and happiness in family.
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