Link: Masquerade

Summary: After a king is poisoned, a double is secretly put in his place to keep chaos from erupting.  But the double has his own ideas about how to run the kingdom.

Thoughts: Because it’s a period drama, I at first thought the film might be similar to Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, but it was much more lighthearted and focused on the character’s noble intentions, making it more like the 1993 American film Dave, involving a double standing in for an American president.  A funny film, but the story’s villains were a little too obviously villainous for the main character’s noble words and decisions to really seem all that astounding; it’s not as if he were making some controversial political or religious statement or something, like Gandhi or Saint Thomas More.  Instead, he made very safe moral judgments that all modern audiences should agree with (unless something is being lost in translation).  So I wasn’t overly impressed with the main character’s moral decisions; they were just too easy.  While some of the potty humor (as in, humor literally involving a potty) was a bit much for me, some of the humor was quite good, and provided a good balance for the film’s more serious moments.  The film also featured a beautiful music score.