Passion Portrait (1991)
Review of Passion Portrait /
젊은날의 초상 (1991), directed by Kwak Ji-kyun
The link above is to the full movie; it is free to watch because of the Korean Film Archive. They offer all the classic Korean films for free to watch with English subtitles on their channel.
My first-ever college course was a Contemporary Korean Cinema course, and I was the only freshman in a class full of juniors and seniors. I had just come back from Korea and moved to New York City. I had signed up for this course because I had tested out of every basic class I needed and could basically do whatever I wanted with my schedule, and so, to calm the nostalgia that I knew I would be facing, I knew Korean Cinema was the way to go.
And it truly was. That class made me realize for the first time how I loved film and looking at it through a sociopolitical and economic status lens was a valid field of criticism. I also loved my professor; she was who I genuinely wanted to be when I grew up. That class built the foundations for who I am today as an academic.
Anyways, the Korean Film Archive is a resource I found myself tapping into a lot for that class. They have so many classic Korean films and they’re all free; most services would charge you to stream so many movies, especially foreign ones that needed subtitles.
But not these guys. To get back on topic, I ended up choosing this film because it was a pick over at the Korean Cultural Center in NYC. On their site that have a recommended viewing list for Korean cinema, and this was one of the editor’s picks. I realized I hadn’t seen a film from the early 1990s before from Korea, unlike Chinese cinema, and so this seemed like a pretty solid choice for a Friday night. And so I pressed play, sat back in my bed, and started watching.
Let’s get straight into this review!
Content
Passion Portrait is set in the era in which it came out, and our main character, Lee Young-hun, has just left his hometown to go to university. It’s a period in time in which Korean history is turbulent, full of political strife, and the democracy movements are ripe specifically among the youth.
He is a poet and third year Korean Literature student at the university at the time of the film, and, as he loses in rock, paper, scissors against his friends, he musters the courage to go up to pretty girls and asks them out. One girl, Hye-yeon, a French and Korean literature student, takes him up on that offer and they go out to eat and discuss his poetry.
The rest of the film then escalates into a melodrama atmosphere, rather than the original lighthearted banter and school life that we began with. And a lot of it is because of the political situation and how our main character joins democracy clubs on campus (and we see lectures about how women shouldn’t be liberal, but that’s a whole different story…).
This film really is a character study as we follow the main character through the story. He starts off pretty immature, treating his girlfriend/first love like shit. He also seems a bit naive about his role in politics and the way he interacts with the democracy club until it becomes very real very quickly. He wants to be a poet, but to be a poet you must wisen up before you can truly become great at your craft.
As he becomes enraged at a party because rich people live so freely, he thinks that he can protest, scream, shout, and get violent without anything happening. The stark reality is different. He is an outsider to this world, and this isolation continues with the onslaught of death that is coming. And, at the end of the boy, he is just a boy. So he goes home to escape Seoul, the memories and life he has created in university. He is not yet mature to handle this life.
There’s some really fascinating shots that gave me an in-depth look to the culture. For example, as the camera focuses on the university students milling around and going to class, they’re all wearing standard clothing for Western attire.
But as what is presumably a mother comes to the campus and talks to her child, she is wearing a full-on traditional hanbok. It’s moments like these that catch my attention as someone interested in history and the rise of consumerism. This, to me, marks a distinct generational shift in which the younger generation are adhering to more Western standards of attire while the older generation continues to act in a way that’s more traditional to the culture.
We also get some shots of university life at the time, such as where students would go to drink, sports players in too-tight uniforms jogging past, how our main character publishes his poems in the school’s literary magazine. These are all so fascinating to me as someone trying to study culture and society, and are truly valuable moments in a film.
Overall Thoughts
All in all, this is a very good film. I don’t think a lot of people actually know about it and its existence, but it won a major film award on the Korean circuit back when it came out in the nineties. I only found out about this movie because of the KCC in NYC, and I’m glad I took a chance on this one despite seeing nothing about it at all online in English.
Sure, I could’ve done the research and exhaust the Korean I do know, but instead I took a chance and it was worth it. If you have two and a half hours to spare, it’s a solid movie that offers so much about the Korean psyche in this era. It’s a very good primer for the films that were made in the early 2000s out of Korea, as well as this pervasive sadness that prevails in Korean literature and art.
