Fridae

South Korea, known as home to some of the best filmmakers on the planet right now, again struts its stuff in another genre with Cyrano Dating Agency, which works as a romantic comedy, a successful cross-cultural adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano De Bergerac, and in general a metatextual parody of the conventions of Korean romantic comedies and dramas, and romantic comedies and dramas in general. It’s the smartest romantic comedy you may likely see this year.

While it may have been easy to imagine Cyrano De Bergerac adapted as a sort of wuxia romantic comedy given that the similarities between the swashbuckling soldier Cyrano and the swordsmen of ancient Korea, Cyrano Dating Agency cleverly chooses a more challenging but more rewarding task of setting it in the modern day and turning the classic setup of Rostand’s play into a timeless commentary on romantic comedies in general.

The Cyrano Dating Agency itself is a dating agency run by a group of actors, led by the charming and charismatic Byeong Hoon (Uhm Tae Woong) using sophisticated gadgets that James Bond would envy, in order to set up situations that will allow their targets to obtain the objects of their desire. Very often these situations are the very stuff of romantic comedies: kisses in the rain, exchanges of umbrellas at subway stations, meet cutes at coffee shops over torch songs by Agnes Baltsa. Needless to say they’re pretty broke and can’t really refuse any client. Even when that client is a handsome but awkward wealthy fund manager (Daniel Choi) who just happens to be after Byeong Hoon’s ex, who he once met in Paris, where they attended a play of you guessed it, Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac. And it hurts Byeong Hoon to no end that he has to woo his ex all over again, even by surrogate...

Cyrano Dating Agency transcends its simple chick-lit roots to offer sophisticated commentaries on the relationship between art and life, and cleverly comments how each shapes the other while both tend to surprise each other in baffling ways. This finds particularly sharp expression in especially in how the numerous dramatic conventions employed in other Korean romantic comedies and dramas are gently mocked and satirized, not just by amplifying their inherent melodrama to ridiculous lengths but also uses clever bait-and-switch techniques to blindside, upturn and even . While the movie’s hero urges that it’s important to “follow the script” in life, yet a play, like life, is such a collaborative effort that the end product is always in doubt even with the script in hand. That it manages to be all this, while all the time remaining an organic, well-developed story on its own speaks all the more to how well-executed it all is, with its metatextual references built solidly into the story, the mise-en-scene and the techniques that builds up to one of the most unforgettable winks at the audience to ever end a movie this year.

Cyrano Dating Agency is an uncommonly clever Korean romantic comedy that is more than meets the eye. It satirizes on its own brethren, it laughs at itself, but it never forgets that it itself is a romantic comedy and needs to tell a solid story on its own. Wee Li Lin’s Forever attempted to send up romantic comedies by showing the disparity between art and life, the map and the ground, but Cyrano Dating Agency goes further to show instead that it’s the journey that needs to made, no matter what the outcome, no matter who’s watching.