Chunhyang

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Star-Crossed Lovers... Be glad for Values Dissonance.

Chunhyang is a movie directed by famous Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-taek (whose following movie was Drunk On Women and Poetry) and released in 2000. It is based on a pansori, a type of traditional Korean performance that involves a storyteller reciting and singing a narrative to the sound of a drum. The movie depicts both the pansori itself being performed, and the story being told.

Mongryong, the son of a newly installed provincial governor, sees the beautiful Chunhyang, the daughter of a former courtesan, and falls in love with her. He arranges to meet her, and to reassure her about the sincerity of his sentiments, agrees to marry her in a secret ceremony. After a period of blissful if clandestine connubial life, Mongryong must leave for Seoul in order to join the ranks of the civil service.

During his absence, a new governor is nominated and claims Chunhyang as a concubine. She refuses, even when jailed and tortured, and is sentenced to be executed. Mongryong, who has in the meantime become a censor in the royal administration, returns in the guise of a beggar, orders the arrest of the governor and sets everything right.

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Tropes used in Chunhyang include:

• Break the Cutie: Chunhyang's imprisonment and torture.
• Doting Parent: Chunhyang's mother.
• Fourth Date Marriage: Second date, actually.
• Happily Ever After: So the tale ends.
• Love At First Sight
• Show Within a Show: The story within the performance.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: A nobleman's son and a former courtesan's daughter.
• The Government: Its status is ambiguous, unsurprisingly for a tale set in a Confucian society. The new governor is depicted as despotic (see below), but the hero can set things right by becoming an agent of the central government.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: The new governor is despotic, lecherous and corrupt.