The Face Reader

The Face Reader’s Korean title Gwansang (guanxiang in Chinese) refers to a form of divination or fortunetelling that supposedly allows one to figure out a person’s personality, proclivities and destiny from his or her facial features. The film reunites busy star Song Kang-ho (Snowpiercer) with Han Jae-rim, director of The Show Must Go On and Rules of Dating.

Even though its story is a downer, given that the movie is ultimately about the powerlessness of a good person against the larger forces of history, it still proved to be a huge hit during the 2013 Chuseok (lunar harvest) holiday season, raking in more than 9 million tickets. Like another recent smash hit Masquerade, The Face Reader is an upgraded period drama (sageuk) that builds off of the recent TV successes of similar genre efforts.

Under director Han’s sure hand, the film deftly combines the high gloss of court pageantry, sophisticated melodramatics, clever dialogue and the requisite projection of contemporary Korean obsessions to the distant past. The film’s protagonist Nae-kyung, impressively brought to life by Song Kang-ho, is a failed upper-class academic whose family has been persecuted for standing on the wrong side of the political fence. As the film opens, he is recruited by a high-class Seoul courtesan (Kim Hye-soo, The Thieves) to service her bigwig clientele. At first content to be a witty raconteur, he gradually wins the trust of important men such as the king’s adviser Kim Jong-seo (Baek Yoon-shik, The Taste of Money), and even the king himself. He also renews ties with his estranged son Jin-hyung who has become a low-ranking court official.

To his ultimate heartbreak, though, his increasingly significant role in the eyes of the powerful gets him deeply embroiled in the Joseon Dynasty’s first major succession crisis of 1455. Aside from Song’s non-flashy but brilliant lead performance, the film benefits from a host of talented actors. Kim Hye-soo is as delectably sexy as ever, and Baek Yun-shik brings an air of stalwart, medieval-knight gravitas. Given the film’s premise, one of the chief pleasures of The Face Reader is an abundance of supporting players with “interesting faces.” More problematic however is Lee Jung-jae’s Prince Sooyang, the characterization of which illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of The Face Reader. On the one hand, it is great to see Prince Sooyang portrayed as a sort of nomadic barbarian, decked in dark animal fur and hunting tigers.

It is an image completely unlike how he is portrayed in 1970s and 1980s period pieces, but possibly more historically accurate. (He is said to have shot seven arrows at a running deer during a hunt, and each arrow penetrated the unlucky deer’s neck. This when he was thirteen years old.) On the other hand, Lee is directed to play him more or less as a cruel bastard, without much shading of character, obviously to call into the viewer’s mind more familiar contemporary figures such as twentieth-century military dictators. This ideologically unimaginative characterization, and the lugubrious tone that dominates the film’s second half, contrasts with the poignant and hugely entertaining Mentalist-like facial reading Nae-kyung displays in the first half. You could do a lot worse than The Face Reader in making a Joseon-dynasty-set period piece. I wish it could have done a bit more with the psychologically astute exploration of the Korean mindset revealed in Nae-kyung’s interaction with various characters, without turning into another grandiloquently tragic, politically resentful “spectacle” in the second half, but overall I must say it well deserves its box office success.