All for Love

Starring: Eom Jeong-hwa, Kim Changhoo, Hwang Jeong-min

Director Min Kyu-dong

Category: IIA (Korean)

You could call it South Korean Cinema 101. Director Min Kyu-dong's multi-storied comedy-drama is a crash course in the cliches, conventions and star power that have helped propel South Korea's film industry to the popular acclaim once enjoyed by Hong Kong filmmakers.

The emotional territory covered in All for Love's seven crisscrossing tales is less poignant than glib, but the able cast is directed with such panache that there are surprisingly few dull spots, despite a running time of 132 minutes.

The action neatly takes place over seven days (as reflected in the Chinese title which, like the original Korean, translates as The Most Beautiful Week of My Life). The scenario (co-written by the director and Yoo Sung-hyup) is a jigsaw puzzle with so many diverse characters and situations that the initial reels pass as if in a blur.

There's a coquettish psychiatrist (Eom Jeong-hwa) engaged in a Hepburn-Tracy style battle of the sexes with a macho but naive police detective (Hwang Jeong-min); a novice Catholic nun (Yoon Jin-seo) attracted to a washed-up teen idol (Jeong Kyung-ho) with whom she shares a hospital room; and an over-the-hill basketball star (Kim Soo-ro) who may or may not be the father of a little girl dying of cancer (Kim Yoo-jeong). And that's fewer than half of the major players.