Our Joyful Young Days

The second film in the series is entitled Our Sweet Days or Our Joyful Young Days (기쁜 우리 젊은 날, Gippeun wuri jeolmeun-nal), a 1987 film directed and co-written by Bae Chang-ho (배창호). Maybe there was something novel about this script in 1987 (I doubt it), but it's certainly been made a thousand or more times since then. It goes like this: Pathetic Loser falls in love with Dream Girl, and starts Stalking her. DG, who really should get a Restraining Order, instead is Gently Standoffish. PL persists. DG Goes Away, and PL is crushed. DG returns, and PL runs into her Quite by Accident. It turns out that DG Has Issues of Her Own. And so forth. Believe me, if you've ever seen a Korean melodrama, you know exactly where this is going, and even if you haven't, when it reaches what seems like a relatively happy ending point and there's still a half-hour to go, well, consider yourself warned.

The Pathetic Loser is played by the always reliable Ahn Sung-ki, veteran of more films than I can count, including some of Im Kwon-taek's better films (Festival, The Taebaek Mountains), huge hits like Lee Jang-ho's Eoudong, and classics like The Housemaid (made when he was 8) and Chilsu and Mansu. Ahn is still active today, taking elder statesman roles in such films as Im's Chihwaseon and Kang Woo-suk's Hanbando. Here, Ahn is asked to be the emotionally stunted, unsure and klutzy Young-min, and he doesn't do much with this thankless role. It might have been nice to see some emotional growth over the two hour running time; nowadays that would be expected from this genre, as it makes the emotional payoff in the final scene either richer or more sappy, depending on your tastes. Ahn, who is now and was then a better actor than he shows here, instead just mugs and cries his way to the inevitable conclusion. Opposite Ahn is the positively luminous Hwang Cine (or Hwang Shin-hye, 황신혜) in her film debut. Hwang was, for a time, Park Chul-soo's muse, appearing in five of his films in the 1990s, and while still active today, is perhaps better known for having a line of lingerie named for her. Here, she is mostly required to look both beautiful and unapproachable, and she has no trouble whatsoever with these requirements. Her role should actually have been the more interesting of the two (as I said above, she Has Issues), but her character is one-dimensional, existing just so Young-min has something to react to. Had this film been written from Hye-rin's POV, it would have doubtless been a better, or at least more interesting, film. Ah, well.

It's not a terrible film, and is certainly well made with some very good compositions here and there. If I had seen this in 1987, before I grew bone-weary of this genre, I'm sure I would have liked it a lot better than I do today. I wouldn't buy the box solely for this film, but it wouldn't keep me from buying it, either. And anyway, there's really nothing wrong with looking at Hwang Cine, "the most perfect face in Korea," for two hours, now is there?*

All the major players here (Bae, Ahn, Hwang, and co-screenwriter Lee Myung-se) will reunite the following year for Gagman, Lee's directorial debut and the next film in this series. I'm somewhat less than breathless in anticipation.

The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 ratio, sort of; it's enhanced for 16x9, making the display ratio actually 1.78:1, but I won't quibble. The print, apart from a few speckles, looks very good. Audio (Dolby Digital stereo) has a hiss, but it is also quite good. Subtitles are also good; perhaps not quite as good as those in Yeong-ja's Heydays; "in" and "on" get mixed up occasionally, and there's a laugh-out-loud moment when the name Lee Strasberg shows up as 'Lee Streetsbourg', but these are minor issues. Again there is an unsubbed director's commentary track, as well as a trailer, poster, and photo gallery.

*Most of this background information on Hwang is taken from Darcy Paquet's brief profile of her at the indispensible koreanfilm.org, which is also the source of the photo of Hwang used above. Now excuse me while I go buy a Hwang Cine thong...