Portrait of Youth

"Find the substance of your nihility."
This bit of wisdom is given to the hero of Portrait of Youth (젊은 날의 초상; aka Portrait of the Days of Youth) as he nears the completion of his quest for...for...for whatever the hell it is he's been questing for the previous two hours. It also might as well have been the order of the day for director Kwak Ji-kyun (Plum Blossom) and writer Jang Hyeon-su (who later directed Everybody Has Secrets) in this, the 1990 installment of the Korean Movie Classic Collection 1975-1994.

Jung Bo-seog (Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors) plays Young-hoon, a young man whose character is so sketchily laid out that I could describe him equally well as an aimless drifter, a lovelorn poet, or a radical in search of a cause. He's taciturn and introspective, speaking only rarely, which is a real handicap to the understanding of the film, given that he's the narrator. He drifts first to his brother's house, where he collects a little money from his mother's estate and is informed that he's "the hope of the family," then to a coal mine for no apparent reason, and thence to a college, where he takes up with two revolutionaries and courts a pretty but completely bourgeois co-ed. The relationship ends badly, and both of his radical friends die tragically. Driven by his demons, Young-hoon drifts away from the (now-closed) college into the countryside. He's haunted, but as it turns out not by any of the foregoing events, but rather by his having witnessed, as a boy, some illicit sex between his teacher and a local girl he had a crush on. He next has a chance encounter with this paramour at her father's funeral, but she escapes before Young-hoon has a chance to speak with her. He spends the next six hours of screen time (feels that way, anyway) trying to locate locating her. Along the way he encounters the Hooker With a Heart of Gold as well as an itinerant knife sharpener who seems to have wandered out of another century (and who provides the great advice quoted above), and together the three of them...well, they wander around for a while. Finally tracking down his puppy love, Young-hoon tearfully admits to her "I really don't know what's what." Brother, you said a mouthful!

The picture (1.85:1 anamorphic) and sound (Dolby 2.0) are fine; the cinematography by frequent Im Kwon-tael collaborator Jung Il-sung matches the mood of the film with lots of long shots in gray skies or darkness, rain or snow. The disc is graced with the usual not-so-special features: trailer, poster, and photo gallery. With each film in this series, moving forward chronologically, it seems that the subtitling gets a little worse. There were more obvious mistakes here, but as before it's not something that will harm your understanding of the film. Of course, I have exactly zero understanding of this film; the subtitled dialogue may as well have been from another movie for all the good it did me. (After 45 minutes had elapsed, I was so lost that I actually skipped backwards chapter by chapter, hoping that the disc might have skipped one somehow. It hadn't.) It's not that uncommon for a film to be so wrapped up in symbolism and metaphor that its deeper meaning entirely escapes me; for all I know, Young-hoon represents Man's Inhumanity to Man, while the hooker Miss Yoon is The Plight of the Korean People. Somebody obviously appreciates it; KOFA thought it should be part of this series of "classics," and it did win a Best Film award at a festival (the 1991 "Grand Bell Awards"). So although this film may not exactly run to my tastes, your mileage may vary.

[WARNING--POTENTIAL SPOILER]
Maybe this will help clear things up: towards the end of the film, Jung-hoon leans up against a tree and (as the narrator) says "It's time to end the play. Existence doesn't exist without continuation. A glass of wine should be emptied. Despair is the real start of existence."

I dunno; maybe it's just that my nihility is too substanceless.