The movie Portrait of a Family (original title Bi Gwang) opens heavily by explaining the true meaning hidden in the illustration of the 'Bi Gwang' card, commonly used in the traditional Korean card game Hwatu. If you look closely at the image on the card, it depicts a frog continuously jumping toward a weeping willow amidst pouring rain. This serves as a metaphor for desperate survival—enduring and surviving to the very end without giving up, despite numerous failures and hardships. Although the Bi Gwang card clearly carries the glamorous title of 'Gwang' (Light), it has a unique and ironic fate where its sub-card, the seemingly insignificant 'Ssang-pi' (Double Pi), is often much more valuable and useful in actual gameplay than the title itself.
Recalling the rules of Go-Stop makes the peculiar position of Bi Gwang even clearer. Generally, in Go-Stop, the first to score 3 points wins. If you collect three of the other Gwang cards, it is immediately recognized as 3 points, acting like a cheat code for victory. Because the Gwang card itself is such a precious entity that everyone covets, gathering three is never an easy task. However, among these precious Gwang cards, Bi Gwang alone carries a fatal penalty: even if you collect it with two other Gwang cards to make a set of three, it only counts as 2 points, not 3. Instead, the Pi belonging to Bi Gwang is recognized instantly for the value of 2 points as a Ssang-pi. Therefore, during the game, gathering practical Pi cards to score quickly often proves much more advantageous than collecting flashy Gwang cards.
Because of these peculiar rules of the Hwatu board, Bi Gwang is often used as a literary device to symbolize the socially weak or marginalized individuals who fail to assimilate into the glamorous mainstream world. However, the male and female protagonists leading the narrative of the movie Portrait of a Family are by no means socially weak or marginalized from the start. Rather, this work traces the tragic trajectory of characters who climb to the absolute highest peak of the world, only to helplessly plummet to rock bottom overnight. The male protagonist, Hwang Jung-gu, played by actor Ryu Seung-ryong, is a legendary and enviably successful figure who reached the pinnacle of the sports world by leading his professional baseball team to a championship.
In addition to this, his wife Nam-mi, played by actress Ha Ji-won, was also a glamorous celebrity who reigned as the era's greatest top star, monopolizing the public's infinite love and spotlight. The two, who were at the very top of their respective fields, generated massive buzz just by meeting each other, and they received everyone's jealous envy by holding a grand wedding. This couple, who lived a flawless and glamorous life with nothing to envy, one day gets swept up in an unexpected, massive scandal, literally facing a sudden downfall. However, from the perspective of the audience watching the movie, a slight question arises as to whether that scandal was truly fatal enough to drag the era's greatest top star couple down to such a miserable rock bottom, feeling a bit excessive.
The decisive incident that fractures their perfect life begins when the shocking truth that Hwang Jung-gu has a hidden biological daughter is revealed to the world. A woman Hwang Jung-gu briefly dated in the past suddenly passes away, leaving behind a bombshell suicide note stating that the child she gave birth to is Hwang Jung-gu's flesh and blood. Hwang Jung-gu proceeds with a paternity test with a half-doubting heart, but the result undeniably proves she is his biological daughter. This fact instantly becomes prey for entertainment reporters and dominates the headlines of all media outlets. The couple's perfect image plummets into the abyss in an instant, and even the ugly sight of Hwang Jung-gu and Nam-mi, suffering from extreme stress, fighting crudely on the street is captured by paparazzi cameras and broadcast live to the public.
To make matters worse, Hwang Jung-gu discovers a reporter secretly filming their disgrace and loses his temper, committing physical violence. As this incident is widely reported, the couple's careers in the entertainment and sports industries come to a complete end. Nam-mi, a top star who used to receive glamorous spotlights, can no longer even dream of proper acting activities and is reduced to wandering as a panelist on an unpopular third-rate program that no one watches just to make a living. Hwang Jung-gu, too, falls into an inescapable abyss, facing a bleak situation where he cannot even secure a coaching position for a local amateur school baseball team due to his criminal record for assault. Amidst this miserable situation, the daughter who suddenly appeared in the past, Hwang Dong-joo (played by Kim Si-a), has grown into a high school student and becomes deeply entangled in another serious incident.
From the moment the daughter is implicated in a labyrinthine case, the movie earnestly begins to cross the boundaries between a thriller and a family drama, uncovering the uncomfortable truths that had been tightly hidden beneath the surface one by one. In this process, a strong question of plausibility hovers in the mind: no matter how much they lost the public's love and their image hit rock bottom, could the massive wealth accumulated by a former top-tier celebrity and a championship-winning professional baseball player evaporate into thin air overnight? In the movie, this family is depicted as extremely poor, completely out of money to the point of worrying about their next meal. Although a passing line is introduced as an excuse, mentioning that they squandered their fortune paying off loans, it comes across as a somewhat loose setup to perfectly persuade the audience.
Nevertheless, what drives the immersion of the movie to the very end is the insane presence of the supporting actors who solidly back up the leads. The most eye-catching figures in the play are undeniably the talented actors Kim Sun-young and Kim Young-min. Actress Kim Sun-young has a wide spectrum ranging from an ordinary neighborhood aunt to a venomous villain, but her unique charm shines far more brilliantly when playing a character harboring somewhat bizarre and colorful secrets, as she does in this film. On the other hand, actor Kim Young-min, who previously received rave reviews from critics and audiences for playing the ghost of Leslie Cheung wearing only a white undershirt in the movie Lucky Chan-sil, unfortunately leaves a sense of regret as recent directors do not seem to fully utilize his uniquely pathos-filled characters. In this movie as well, he was given an incredibly distinctive and unconventional role from his first appearance, but his screen time was far too small compared to his dramatic impact, leaving a deep sense of longing.
The final destination that Portrait of a Family aims to reach at the end of its pursuit of incidents is, ultimately, the "true meaning of family." In the early part of the film, the family coldly lives their lives as if indifferent to each other, resenting one another and treating each other as burdens. However, when a massive and fatal problem surrounding the daughter Dong-joo surfaces, they reveal a primal instinct to protect each other, banding together more strongly than any harmonious family. The family that the movie emphasizes does not simply mean the shackles of blood relations. It warmly proves that if people selflessly share their hearts toward something over a long period, fully embrace each other's lowest points, and endure the storms of life together, even strangers without a single drop of shared blood can easily fall into the category of the most tightly knit conceptual family.
The movie successfully grips the audience's concentration until the middle half, based on its own taut suspense and mystery racing toward the truth. However, the resolution process, which gradually passes the climax and reaches the ending, is somewhat forced and clunky, leaving a strong sense of disappointment. While the intention to show the bitter truth that life never flows exactly as we wish is visible, the feeling that the massive, intertwined conflicts are wrapped up too artificially and abruptly cannot be erased. The actions the characters show in the process of resolving the crisis are emotionally somewhat excessive, coming across as a complacent compromise, as if saying, "If we just gloss over and stitch it up roughly like this, it'll be fine." Looking back, Director Lee Ji-won, who helmed this film, and child actress Kim Si-a already showed excellent chemistry in the past well-made movie Miss Baek. Portrait of a Family had also finished all filming early in 2021, but due to various circumstances such as distribution difficulties, it was locked in a warehouse for a long time of five years before finally being released. While the belated release of the film that finally saw the light is welcome, the slightly worn-out seams of the narrative, proportional to the time passed, seem to vividly show the inevitable sorrow of a warehouse movie, leaving a bitter aftertaste.
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