A rice cake kills her son. That's when the sharecropper stops being polite.
Jeom-rye works as a sharecropper to make a living for her good-for-nothing husband and her son Yong. But the village men are always trying to seduce her. When she rebuffs her landlord's advances, she is wrongly accused by his wife and is forced to leave. Sam-su, the servant who is smitten with her, offers to lend her husband, Deok-hi, money for her affections. Deok-hi tries to sell her off to Sam-su but Jeom-rye gets him arrested for trafficking humans. Sam-su realizes Jeom-rye's sincerity and drops the charges and Deok-hi repents his ways only too late. He dies of an illness. When her son Yong dies from indigestion after eating rice cakes, she goes off the edge.
Acting
Seonu Il-Ran's volcanic restraint before the final explosion.
Direction
Kim Su-hyeong builds pressure like a sealed pressure cooker.
Director
Kim Su-hyeong
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Kim Su-hyeong was a rare female director in 1980s Korean cinema, and this film's unflinching look at rural women's economic vulnerability was practically unheard of under Chun Doo-hwan's censorship.
The title's mundane object becomes a loaded symbol: rice cakes represent festival, family, and in the final act, the indigestible weight of a life consumed by others.
KR
