Feeling ugly sucks. It’s the worst. There is little more crippling, more self-sabotaging, more dead-ending than a personal lack of self-worth. God help you if your self-worth is entirely tied to your physical appearance or –even worse- your perception of your physical appearance. It’s a wonder anyone ever gets out of bed. And that’s why cautionary tales like Beauty Water exist.
Yaeji (voice of Moon Nam-Sook) is the kind of person who brings potato chips to a board meeting. The self-loathing overweight make-up artist has compounded her misery by working directly for a top-ranked model. Want to feel bad about how you look? I can think of no better way than working directly for someone who gets paid well for looking exactly the way they do.
Inspired by the kind of guy who would normally never give her the time of day, Yaeji hits the dumps where she finds “Beauty Water,” a miracle product that can only work in movies. Hmmm, how shall I put this: You soak in it and it siphons off excess you; yeah, that’s science, just like Milli Vanilli was a band. But hey, don’t soak too long; have you ever seen experiments demonstrating the corrosive effects of Coca-Cola? It’s sort of like that, only … more.
You knows there’s jus’ gon’ be trouble when the “ugly” duckling become a beautiful swan and that ain’t enough. Yes, Beauty Water works
miracles and yet new Yaeji is –if anything- even worse than old Yaeji. What do you do with that? Oh, I get it. This is a cautionary tale, isn’t it? Like that “Popeye” cartoon I saw as a kid where he liberates all the animals in a pet store, but the dumbass parrot won’t leave and instead sings “Leave Well Enough Alone” over and over again. I’m sure that went over just swell at the time with Jim Crow fans.
Beauty Water was strangely intense and very pointed. What started as a desperate desire to change a self-appearance grows into something much darker – and this is, clearly, the metaphor of the film. It’s an important lesson, of course, accepting what you can change vs. what you can’t and realizing that short cuts to self-esteem are rarely worth the effort (and often-yet-unintentionally affect others). As a cruel message of “things could be worse, y’know?” Beauty Water is the kind of film you want to show every teenager, especially those you suspect of bulimia. But even without the message, it works as an effective thriller it its own right. HIFF did not have a great 2020, but this was among its best offerings.
Life preys upon those with weakness inside
From your ego there is nowhere to hide
It takes pains to make beauty
And a personal call of duty
There’s a fine line between vanity and suicide
Not Rated, 85 Minutes
Director: Kyung-hun Cho
Writer: Han-bin Lee
Genre: Be careful what you wish for
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People with a keen sense of cautionary tales
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The vain
