The Price of Beauty

Just watched a Korean movie '200 Pounds Beauty' (Boy... I miss Korean movies... don't get them a lot in Sydney). Movie stars actress Kim A-Joong and actor Joo Jin-Mo (who looks amazingly a lot like Hong Kong actor Ekin Cheng), and is about Hanna, an overweight ghost singer of a famous pop star (A-Joong) who has always secretly been in love with the producer (Jin-Mo). Fed up with being teased and not having a chance in life, she undegoes drastic plastic surgery and comes out looking totally different. She renames herself Jenny, then reconnects with the producer, and finds herself getting a shot at the fame and love she always longed for. But not without a price - she soon finds herself losing the simplicity she had as her old self, including having to ignore her best friend and father in order to protect her real identity from being known. The climax comes when it's her debut concert as Jenny... she goes up onto the stage... and freezes in front of thousands of people. Fed up with her pretense and falsehood, she confesses that she's actually Hanna - the overweight girl she used to be. The saving factor comes when the crowds start chanting 'It doesn't matter', and she ends up singing and performing her first concert not as Jenny, but as Hanna. The movie ends with the narrator saying that Jenny tumbled that day, but Hanna (the new-remaked Hanna) emmerged as one of the top pop singers of her day.

I find myself having mixed feelings after watching the movie. Don't quite know what to make of the signals that come from the movie. On one hand, the movie exposes the suffering of the pretense and falsehood that comes from trying to live a separate identity by escaping from how one really is (or looks). The resolution comes when Hanna is able to confess her true identity and is freed from that pretense, achieving reconciliation with her father and friend. But on the other, I wonder if the movie is silently promoting plastic surgery. Afterall, the movie ends with Hanna (but it's the new remaked Hanna) being happy, popular, and getting what she always hoped for. The movie also ends with Hanna's friend, who herself isn't the most pretty, going to the plastic surgeon and saying, "I want a total makeover".

I think in the end, the movie sends the signal of living truthfully and authentically and not living under pretense or falsehood; but yet one can do so while undergoing the knife or worse, by undergoing the knife. I'm really not sure whether this is the message we want to send to people?