[HanCinema's Film Review] "Ditto 2022"

Yong (played by Yeo Jin-goo) is a very tall, very dopey looking mechanical engineer in 1999 who's given an unusual job. He's to show Han-sol (played by Kim Hye-yoon) around campus. He rather predictably develops a crush on her. And it takes a surprisingly long time for "Ditto 2022" to get around to its actual premise, which is that the woman Yong is talking to via Ham radio for an unrelated school project, Moo-neui (played by Cho Yi-hyun) is actually from the future. Or well, the present day, relative to us.

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"Ditto" is not the kind of film anyone really thought of as needing to be remade. The Secret from Jay Chou and "Il Mare" are both more obvious candidates of the same premise...and both of those have also been remade. "Secret: Untold Melody" is the South Korean version of The Secret, incidentally. What "Ditto" had going for it was mainly metatextual. It launched the career of Ha Ji-won in a technical second lead role as the love interest of the man with the radio.

Amusingly enough, "Ditto 2022" may have accomplished the same. I assume HanCinema's readers are interested in this movie lately mainly because Kim Hye-yoon plays the girl in Ha Ji-won's place, a relatively plain looking young woman who nevertheless inspires Yong with her sheer passion for mechanical engineering. Even if her character is mainly reactive, Kim Hye-yoon shines in the role, becoming symbolic of the idea of a future of limitless possibilities.

To be quite honest, I was prepared to dislike "Ditto 2022" by about the halfway point. The movie's cute, sure, but Yong gets surprisingly controlling surprisingly quickly after a certain point, and it's hard to sympathize with him in spite of the fantastic nature of his situation. Yet the film is oddly elevating in memory, because the themes really are just that strong- the idea of a future having many different possibilities.

It's underexposited, to be sure, in part because Yong isn't really engaging with the idea. But that's because he's young and stupid, and that's why you go to college, because you're young and stupid and are trying to get a better grasp of who you are and what you want to do with the world. Yong comes to that journey through a more roundabout way than he was expecting, and is emotionally frustrated by that, yet ultimately accepts that his dreams have to be his own, just as everyone else's dreams have to be their own.

That's what makes "Ditto" different from all the time slip romance stories of yesteryear and "Ditto 2022" different from all the time slip romance stories of today. This is fundamentally a story about coping with idea of possibilities, and accepting that the future you may want right now may not be the future that's best for you going forward. The thought experiment is humbling, and possibly the kind that's only really resonant for someone dealing with an emotion like heartbreak. But it's certainly one worth pondering.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Ditto 2022" is directed by Seo Eun-young, and features Yeo Jin-goo, Cho Yi-hyun, Kim Hye-yoon, Na In-woo, Bae In-hyuk, Roh Jae-won. Release date in Korea: 2022/11/16.

 

Available on DVD from YESASIA

DVD (TW - English Subtitled)