Forever the Moment - The Best Moment of Our Lives
Forever the Moment (Uri saengae choego-ui sungan (The Best Moment of Our Lives), 우리 생애 최고의 순간, 2008)
Director: Lim Soon-Rye (Im Sun-rye, Yim Soonrye)
These cultural backgrounds might be helpful to appreciate Forever The Moment better.
1. Handball is not a popular sport in Korea. Right, this is not that surprising. It’s not a popular sport in many countries. You probably have not heard about this sport at all until now. Because of unpopularity, handball players in Korea have difficulties in pursuing their dreams. The professional league is little more than a name. While players in European countries or neighbor country Japan are improving their skills, some Korean players have to worry about their living.
2. The Olympic Games is a big deal in Korea, and it’s such an honor for athletes to make it to the national team for the Olympics. Koreans love to get together for such international sports events and root for Korean teams. Koreans are usually fond of the story where main characters overcome their obstacles and achieve their goals.
3. In Korea, ajumma*, married woman, is not appreciated much. As the society accepts younger beautiful single women more kindly, ajumma is often not respected and even mocked as unattractive, indelicate, selfish and rude. Because of this deep-rooted cultural prejudice, ajumma usually has a tougher time in searching for what they want in their lives.
The director Lim Soon-Rye tells us these ajumma handball players’ struggles to make it the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. Based on the true story of the actual team that went to Athens in 2004, the director focuses on development of characters and their feelings rather than making it a glamorous sports movie.
After a few twists, three main protagonists, Han Mi-suk (Mun So-ri), Kim Hye-kyeong (Kim Jeong-eun), and Song Jeong-ran (Kim Ji-yeong) re-unite in the national team to rekindle the glory of the gold medal of the Barceloana Olympic Games. However, the team with many younger players are not well-disciplined and the team’s new coach, Ahn Seung-pil (Eom Tae-woong), a former handball star, is trying European training methods when they have only a month to go to the Olympics.
The conflicts get worse when the younger players and the coaches disregard these so-called “over-the-hill” players (by their age). To make it worse, Mi-suk, who is one of the best players in Korean handball history and yet has had tough financial hardships because her husband’s debt, can’t take the despair of broken pride any more and leaves the team.
After lively depicting their bittersweet life stories, the director Lim draws all the players to reconcile with solid and heart-warming motif and make them head to Athens as a united team.
Outstanding acting of Mun So-ri and Kim Jeong-eun adds more strength and credibility to this movie. It’s very impressive that Kim Jeong-eun has successfully changed her romantic comedy girl image with such imposing performance. Kim Ji-yeong’s prominent performance as a fun firecracker is indispensable in the movie. Her thick Kyeongsangdo dialect throws harmless humor. I enjoyed it very much! Unfortunately, it seems that this has not been successfully translated in English subtitles.
This movie may not have the best handball game on the screen, but it’s filled with emotional flows of frustration, contempt, courage, humor, forgiveness, sympathy, determination, and hope as we see in our everyday lives as well as in many sports games. Lim Soon-rye has also succeeded in sending a message to Koreans, who tend to pay attention to things for a while when they’re in highlight, but forget about them soon. If we want the handball sport to be the top of the world, people should support it as well as the government should make their efforts to make the league thriving.
- The total number of admissions of this movie in Korea was 4,044,543.
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