This 2007 comedy film follows foreign student Junko as she travels from Japan to Korea on a scholarship to learn Korean. She also wants to use this opportunity to look for a Korean boy that she had fallen in love with back in Japan who had moved back to Korea before she had the chance to confess to him.
Junko comes to stay in a little guesthouse owned by a friendly man, but she soon is at odds with his son, Jong Man, who lives there too. Junko quickly becomes uncomfortable and intends to leave, so the guesthouse owner blackmails his son into making sure that Junko keeps staying at the guesthouse as they really need her money to pay for expenses that Jong Man has racked up. After inadvertently discovering that Junko has come to Korea to search for the boy she likes, Jong Man lies and tells her that he knows the boy she is looking for, and he’ll help her meet him if she stays.
Much like the first instalment of this film franchise, this film’s humour is based around the ups and downs of Junko and Jong Man’s interactions as Jong Man’s father forces him to teach her Korean as part of his punishment. At times it’s a little predictable as Jong Man teaches the oblivious Junko swear words and incorrect proverbs, but that doesn’t stop it from being comedy gold when an earnest Junko is enthusiastically greeting her new classmates without realising that she’s cussing them out.
My one slight complaint about this film is that initially it seemed, like a fair few other Korean films I’ve seen, My Tutor Friend Lesson 2 contained a fairly 2-dimensional look at foreigners in Korea, with the exception of the main character who had the redeeming quality of being part Korean anyway. The majority of the Westerners you see in this film greet others in their own languages and seem confused when Koreans don’t understand them, and when they do speak Korean, they speak slang and swearwords and little else. I don’t doubt that this may have been somewhat founded in truth at some point, but I’d like to think that people going to Korea with the intention of studying Korean would probably be trying to learn more than rude colloquialisms.
I would recommend this film to any fans of the first My Tutor Friend film, and anyone who enjoys a fairly light-hearted comedy. It’s nothing groundbreaking and definitely contains some romance, but it’s wonderful for when you want an easy-to-watch film with guaranteed easy laughs.
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