Hot Young Bloods

The year 1982, a town in the Chungcheong region. Joong-gil is the boy who does well with girls at school; he is always courting someone and takes none of them seriously. Young-sook leads the girls' gang; nobody crosses her and everyone is afraid of her. The two are childhood friends. Young-sook loves him and does not say so. Joong-gil does not know it, or pretends not to. A girl called Soo-young arrives and Joong-gil attaches himself to her. At the same time another gang leader returns to the town and is after Young-sook. Lee Yeon-woo directs. Park Bo-young, Lee Jong-suk, Kim Young-kwang and Lee Se-young are in the cast. It is a Korean production. Its ground is provincial Korea at the start of the eighties; the school order, the clothes and the music carry the marks of the period. The narrative begins as comedy and hardens entirely in the last section. The character Park Bo-young plays is not a conventional woman's role; she fights, she loses, and the narrative does not try to correct her. The matter it treats is the thing not said; both characters know and neither speaks. The fights are not built as comedy and their consequences are shown. The event in the last section changes the whole register. Its limit is balance; the passage between comedy and drama is abrupt and arrives unprepared for some. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean films about the young and period narratives. Who it is not for: the register is uneven, the ending bitter, and the humour crude in places.