Scent (2014)

Story: A simple love story. If you are saturated with all those personality disorder, psychological thriller, alien, ghost,action, historical and mystery type romances that are all the rage nowadays and just want to get back to a simple straight-forward modern romance with a happy ending, this movie is the one for you. Kang In-Jun is a simple man who works hard to afford a home in Busan. He dreams of one day settling down and spending his days growing old with his girlfriend in that house. However, his girlfriend - a traveling photojournalist, hopes to spend the rest of her life traveling with her love one. Due to this incompatibility in life direction, one day his girlfriend packed her bags and left to see the world without him. Her first stop - Shanghai. Still very much in love, he travels to Shanghai in hopes of finding and conciliating with her. While in Shanghai, he meets Zhu-Lie - a woman who is about to get engaged but found out that her boyfriend was cheating on her. Through an accident, Kang In-Jun and Zhu-Lie ended up living together. Hence, begins a love story between the two.

Acting/Cast: I have no complains for the acting of the main couple. Zhu-Lie seems to exhibit more emotion towards In-Jun who seems to be the naive, honest-to-goodness Busan boy type character. The only person with acting problem is the guy who plays the role of Zhu-Lie's friend who can speak Korean...it was obvious he's new and his acting was odd at places. Other than that, everyone's done a good job. There were a couple of odd 'bridging' scenes where ppl do not speak (or speak little) and just look at each other with multiple expressions on their faces. I put that down to the awkwardness of communication when one is speaking Mandarin and another, Korean. That can be interpreted as a natural scene in real life when you have ppl speaking different languages trying to communicate to each other. You'll end up using nonverbal communication and one letter words instead. The actors and actresses in this movie use 3 languages:- Korean, Mandarin and English. If you ask me, where international romances are involved, this is a very normal situation.

Music: Love the OST sung by Park Si-Hoo and the faster beat ending OST.

Rewatch value: I give this a pretty high rewatch value simply because it's a movie. This is an easy watch -simple love story and just require 1 hour and 45 mins of your time. Some ppl complain about the slower pace but I find the pace acceptable. I've watched many melodramas, a bit of an expert in Chinese movies (hence used to their style of story-telling) and trust me when I say the pace of this movie is much better than a typical melodrama. Everything flows nicely towards an ending that did not feel rushed. If you are bored out in a weekend and just want to watch something passable and uncomplicated, this is the movie for you.

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I'm going to echo my friend Jay Jay's review. On the spot. Movie is bad... badly written and badly acted by about everyone. Very juvenile script and dialogue. There isn't a one of us who has watched Romance dramas who couldn't have written this just as well if not a whole lot better.

However, it is beautiful to look at cinematically. The visuals were stunning and whomever the cinematographer was, they did a terrific job. Loved the scenes of Shanghai and the neighborhood this was filmed in was so picturesque I wanted to move there! It appears to be dubbed, to it's detriment...also adding in sounds like footsteps, breathing, gasps, grunts, etc.that are too loud and very distracting. The entire soundtrack for the movie was just uncomfortable to listen to.

PSH is gorgeous and so healthy looking in this, thankfully, and speaks a lot of English and quite well! Surprising. His time spent here in the US was well used I think. He was the best in this by far as far as the acting, but with a script as simple as this there was very little 'acting' needed by anyone. Which was good since the rest of the cast were pretty awful. They all appear to be very new or very inexperienced. The best of them being the young man who served as an interpreter. Still I was just so happy to see Park Si Hoo looking so good and doing so well. It was worth watching for the relief from worry. 6/10 for the terrible script, acting, and directing. 8/10 for the joy of seeing PSH get his feet wet and putting forth the effort it must have cost him to move on with his acting life. He did a good job with some pretty bad material. I understand the movie did very well in China where he is immensely popular.

I hope his next project, with a leading lady who has more strength, will be better for him, but I really wish he would find another project similar to Confessions. It would be good to see him take on darker parts, more action oriented to fit in with his martial arts and sporting background.

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