Virtue Intact
A South Korean sex farce rom-com, you say? Not yet.
Forbidden Fairytale
Director: Lee Jong-seok • Writer: Yoon Ju-hun
Starring: Park Ji-hyun, Choi Si-won, Sung Dong-il
South Korea • 1hr 49mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 20 • IIA
Grade: C
Remember a few weeks back, when we said Emmanuelle was the latest in a horny movie trend, and that Forbidden Fairytale | 동화지만 청불입니다 was on deck? Yeah, forget about that, because Forbidden Fairytale is no sexier or hornier than that. It’s actually a painfully chaste and muddled comedy about the value of dirty books as literature and living authentically for yourself. Or something. Park Ji-hyun (Hidden Face) plays Dan-bi, an aspiring children’s book author who needs to pay the bills and so takes a job with Korea’s morality police, AKA the Youth Protection Program, cracking down on hardcore porn on the internet (isn’t that all of the internet though, unless it’s racism?). But wait, there’s more, because ironically Dan-bi is a porn writer herself, which ultimately forces her to confront the prejudices of the writing industry and the limitations she’s put on herself. For all the risqué tittering in the trailer and marketing, Forbidden Fairytale is an entirely unerotic erotic comedy that either can’t or won’t go to the extremes it needs to in order to make its high concept work. And by extremes I don’t mean sex. There isn’t nearly the number of double entendres and awkward bawdy moments a movie like this needs, and it neuters (sorry) the final product. Credit, though, to director Lee Jong-seok and writer Yoon Ju-hun for not making the requisite slutty character the bad guy.
Our virginal heroine Dan-bi gets into the porn game after a fender bender with an online smut peddler, Hwang (Sung Dong-il, Hijack 1971), and damages his precious vintage Porsche side mirror. To pay off the debt, she leverages her writing skills for Hwang’s site – with a little help from her more, uh, worldly friends Chae-yeong (Hwang Se-on) and slutty bartender Jeong-hye (Seol Woo-in). For Dan-bi this is a part-time gig, with an end goal in mind, and when’s she’s covered the cost of the mirror she’s going back to kidlit, something her dear departed father did and a legacy she wants to carry on. While she’s writing her filth at night, her 9-to-5 job has her working closely with Jeong-seok (Choi Si-won), a sweet-natured civil servant with erectile dysfunction issues, who wants to train her, get his promotion, and get the hell out of the department. This is the movie’s real aim, to hook up the attractive thirtysomethings.
Of course, Dan-bi’s stories become an internet sensation – think a minor Fifty Shades phenomenon among normals who get a kick out of a little sexual fantasy – and not only does it put her job at risk, it attracts the attention of a rival publisher, EroKing (Park Geon-il), in the film’s single biggest misstep.
There’s plenty of material that could have been mined from Forbidden Fairytale that simply falls by the wayside, chief among them examining the disrespect heaped upon erotica as a literary form – most of Dan-bi’s stories are a little frisky rather than nasty, and the film’s best moments are in their dramatisations – the place of government in the sexual imagination, a more tempered view of sex work and about unexpectedly finding your path; it’s no spoiler to say Dan-bi stays in the sexy story arena in the end. But whatever convinced Yoon a sexual assault and revenge porn B-story (I shit you not) was a good idea is anyone’s guess, but there it is, and man does it clang with the rest of Forbidden Fairytale’s relatively frothy, if sexless, comedy. The film could have been a bit of a game-changer but Lee pulls his punches at every turn. If you want a more nuanced spin on the place of sexuality or porn in art and society Pang Ho-cheung and Derek Yee (AV and Viva Erotica) did it better. If you just want to perv out, you’d be better off trolling through HBO’s library.