Yoo Hae-jin is one of those movie stars who would seem to flourish as a character actor but somehow is flourishing as a leading man; though, granted, the people he plays are not what you would normally think of as leading man material. And yet he might be the most versatile male actor in Korean cinema. This goofy romantic comedy seems almost custom made for his peculiar skills. Yoon plays Cha Chi-ho, a dedicated food chemist for a snack company whose diet consists of nothing more than the chips he develops through trial-and-error, McDonald’s takeout, and the occasional fried chicken delivery. His large collection of alarm clocks speaks to his OCD predilections, which chart out every second of the day in his mind. As a corollary, he’s not just socially dysfunctional, but also interpersonally illiterate. When his good-for-nothing brother, Seok-ho (Cha In-pyo), comes to his apartment after being released from prison, Chi-ho is welcoming and totally oblivious to Seok-ho’s gambling addiction and scofflaw temperament. He doesn’t even know that he’s the guarantor for a bank loan his brother took out until a loan officer calls him to say that payments are way overdue.

The loan officer is single mother Il-yeong (Kim Hee-sun), who is pretty much the opposite of Chi-ho: brash, uninhibited, with a quick temper and a potty mouth. When she sees Chi-ho waiting his turn at the bank and making funny faces at a small child, something clicks in her. It’s not love at first sight, but more like, “This guy’s weird in a funny way. What makes him tick?” She soon learns that he’s weird in a weird way, but is attracted to him anyway, mainly because he’s completely different from her ex, who knocked her up and then took off. Her now college-age daughter, in fact, became a championship marksman so that if he ever returned (which, of course, he does, eventually) she could shoot him. 

Though hardly a deep movie or, for that matter, an uproariously funny one, Honey Sweet keeps dropping pleasant surprises as it makes its leisurely, detour-strewn way toward a qualified happy ending. Director Lee Han and scriptwriter Lee Byeong-heon mostly lead with their gut, and while the jokes are hit-and-miss, the tone is so good-natured about Chi-ho’s sexual awkwardness that you want to show it to any Hollywood filmmaker thinking of adding a romcom to their resume. It’s like The 40-Year-Old Virgin but with a more realistic idea of why someone is a virgin at the age of 40. That said, most of the situations, which invariably involve food, are patently ludicrous. Nobody could be this naive and remain breathing at the threshold of middle age. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Honey Sweet home page in Japanese

photo (c) Mindmark Inc. & Movierock