Im Kwon Taek. Photo by Ned Schenck.

With a career spanning four decades and a filmography of over a hundred films, 64-year old Korean director Im Kwon Taek has honed his skills and imagination to come up with a dazzling new film, Chunhyang, a colorful, historical epic that gleefully employs super-charged, highly theatrical idioms all the while maintaining a quality that is utterly cinematic.

Chunhyang is a story of passion and politics set in 18th-century Korea: Mongryong (Cho Seung Woo), the privileged son of a local governor in the Korea of 200 years ago, who has had the bad luck to fall for the beautiful Chunhyang (Lee Hyo Jung) – bad luck because her mother is a former courtesan. After a secret marriage, Mongryong goes off to Seoul to finish his education, leaving his wife at the hands of a malevolent regional governor who sentences our heroine to death when she refuses his advances.

Replete with 8,000 extras and 12,000 gorgeous costumes, Chunhyang is Korea's largest production ever. But what makes the film particularly striking is its theatrical framework. Director Im Kwon Taek has chosen to use pansori, a highly-stylized, traditional Korean operatic form of singing and percussion, to recount the tale of the lovers. As a pansori singer performs the story for a modern Korean audience, the film cuts away to a sumptuous period dramatization of what is basically a well-known Korean fairy tale, allowing the sung narration to become a kind of voiceover. Even the film's editing rhythms are made to match the intricate rhythms of the pansori performance, resulting in a stunning mix of cinematic and theatrical language.