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Movie Title: 여교사 (Misbehavior)
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/10)
Year: 2015
Misbehavior tells a tale of two complete opposite lives of boy’s school teacher. Hyo-joo (Kim Ha-neul) constantly feels stressed and miserable as her life is going nowhere. She is a contract based teacher who is constantly worried that she will not get her contract renewed while she is also desperately trying to get a promoted to be a full-time teacher. Her long time boyfriend is a slacker who live off her and one day decides to dump her.
On the other side, the young and beautiful Hae-young (Yoo In-yeong) who is Hyo-joo’s university junior is the newest teacher in the school who instantly took her long waited full-time teacher spot. Hae-young have it all, good looks, good connection and well to do (she is the daughter of the school board’s chairman), trophy boyfriend.
Both their life cross path when Hyo-joo and Hae-young both are drawn to the good looking and charismatic student, Jae-ha ( Lee Won-geun). The movie’s mood took a change when Hyo-joo caught Hae-young and Jae-ha making out in the school gym room. Hyo-joo uses this to emotionally blackmail Hae-young and slowly allowed her arrogance and jealousy blinded her when Hyo-joo herself later got involved with the same student.
While the movie’s manage to build and showcase the injustice of hierarchy in daily lives and workplace, the movie flawed with weak character build up where t he director tries too hard to give everyone screen time, including the dance teacher, Hae-young’s boyfriend and others, which in return sacrificed the build up of the main characters. The movie also lacks emotional connection between the trio which makes it believable that there are love and affection in the relationships – Jae-ha and Hae-young, or Hyo-joo and Jae-ha.
The movie stars of promising but the choppy editing starts to bring the movie to a slow and messy middle, and the abrupt ending leaves audience hoping there were more to it.