I watched a movie called Happy End over at Greenbelt the other day. It's a Korean movie, I think, with Asian actors and such. But the marquee and a title search at IMDb gives me several results which doesn't seem to fit with the movie I actually saw.

What I watched was a domestic drama: a thirtysomething Asian guy in a nice suit spends a lot of his time reading at a second hand book and magazine shop, reading entire books and not buying them, to the annoyance of the shop attendant. He does the groceries and picks up the baby from day care and heads home. He doesn't have a job and is then designated as house husband. Meanwhile, a woman and a blandly cute and bespectacled and tousle-haired Asian guy are getting it on, and how. They seem to defy the limitations of space and human anatomy, contorting themselves into almost impossible positions in the pursuit of satisfying libidinal urges.
Spectacled Guy and Wall Girl had a romantic past: SG kept all her letters, and he has more pictures of her, filling entire albums and using rolls and rolls of Polaroids. Then they head their separate ways and Wall Girl comes home to Mr. House Husband.

Wall Girl chides her husband for taking it easy, for not seemingly being interested in getting another job. There is the conflict of who wears the pants in this house. And even more interestingly, who wears pants and then takes them off rather quickly. The affair gets rather steamy. Spectacled Guy wants his lover to leave the husband and settle a life for "their" family. More and more, Wall Girl forsakes her family to be with her former boyfriend. She even goes to the length of drugging her baby to meet up with him. It is the husband who goes all worried for his always tired wife, the sick baby. Then he discovers the key. The husband seems to know about his wife's past relationship with Spectacled Guy.

When the husband discovers the infidelity, the movie takes the way of the film noir, though not entirely dark. He plots his revenge against the lovers. The husband receives notice for a funeral of a former teacher. The husband asks a friend of his to drive him to the train station, ostensibly to attend the funeral. He charges into the love nest, and combs the place for evidence that the forensic experts would surely find. He then discovers the abundance of pictures, and he goes through them with the pain of learning that there his wife has a far much greater love and lust interest other than him. Indeeed, the only time we see husband and wife in bed together, he had to ask: "Is it any good?" One wonders why she even married him in the first place, if she so loved Spectacled Guy and was even pregnant by him. Was the husband a lackey then? Was the Spectacle Guy unwilling to marry her? It didn't seem like that at all.

The knowledge that his wife might soon leave him, even if she does try to make a valiant stand not to. When she goes home to her husband and tries to make conversation over dinner, making amends, trying to compensate for everything, one can see the guilt on her face, the herculenean effort to do the right thing. How can she help himself? Spectacled Guy is appetizing, his hair falls onto his face with just enough grace, and he can surely bring the house down. The rule she set for their affair, that they both treat it as a fleeting fancy, comes down like a house of cards.

Their inability to overcome and break the affair leads to their ruin. The way the film builds up to this, by presenting the husband as the wronged one and therefore he has the right to make them suffer, wears thin by movie's end. For one thing, the husband proves himself to be smart. He has piled up all the material evidence against Spectacle Guy, he has arranged for himself a brilliant alibi, and by presenting himself as the good house husband, the police will cast the motive for killing not upon him but on his rival.

The film maker piles all the cliches here. While he gets off appearing as the bereaved widower who must now raise "their" child alone, he still doesn't get away with it. In the film's last scene, we see the husband and their baby spooned together in sleep, on the floor facing the balcony. Daylight is starting to pour in, and the husband stirs from his sleep. He cradles the baby, thoroughly knowledgeable of his guilt. I'm not even sure if he realizes that the baby is not his, that while he has managed to get rid of the lovers, the baby that he treasures so fondly is still theirs. Oh well, the irony of it.

Happy End doesn't quite know what to do with itself: it starts out as a domestic drama, dabbles in tragic love story, and ends up a revenge motive light noir. There is nothing really remarkable with the story and the cinematography. It doesn't even cut it as a noir, there isn't enough atmosphere. It isn't the romance that the marquees hark it to be. The Happy End in the movie guide advertises a "new age romance." I'm not even sure if this is indeed the correct movie. All the Happy Ends in the IMDb don't say anything about forensics, or tired old cliches. The only thing common with them is that they all wanted something so badly but they either didn't get what they wanted, or they did get it, only to discover that it's not what they thought it would be. I only watched it because the only alternatives were Jinggoy and Juday's movie and Andrew E.'s. I haven't got that much of a choice, do I?