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[HanCinema's Film Review] "Young Artists"

In the opening sequence, the audience is exposed to a rather drab, unpleasant black-and-white film filtered stage and an equally unappealing high school student. This girl appears to be going through a melancholy checklist of teenage angst and hopeless desperation. I was puzzled watching her. Initially my reaction was caustic dismissal, that she just needed to get her act together. At the same time, her basic hostility to the world around her is perfectly understandable, given that she goes to an acting high school. The poor girl's surrounded by all this dour stuff, even if her real world is in living color.

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"Young Artists" is a film that is very heavy in subtext, subtlety, and characterization. Even though the story's action takes place entirely in a high school, none of the characters represent clear stock character types. Indeed, assuming that they do is a good way to get really confused the longer the film goes on. Similar to real people, the students' portrayal jumps around from sympathetic to aggressive to friendly as times goes on.

There's nice ideas to consider about this kind of naturalistic portrayal. But none of them are really displayed in this film. While I understand what the characters have become by the end of the film, I'm a lot less sure to as how this happened. The play which the students are working to produce, and which stands as the film's central conceit, is how they come together. Nothing really happens during the production that seems to justify the changed relationship, though. Indeed, almost all of the film's major events happen absent the context of the play.

We get plenty of bits and snippets of the play, a Korean translation of Closer, throughout this film. The individual monologue pieces are extremely strong. It's so easy to connect the students with the characters they play that I often had trouble distinguishing who was supposed to be who at any given moment. These are very intense emotional moments, especially contrasted with the film's general crawling movement.

The pacing in this film is so slow that it's easy to get exhausted by all this deliberate, introspective focus. This film has one of the strongest cultural barriers I've ever seen. I get the impression there's a lot of material here that only Korean, or even only Koreans with experience in acting-centered high schools will be able to understand. Subtitles alone aren't enough to get this kind of nuance across. We practically need annotations to really process the subtler moments.

The more I think about this film the surer I am that there's some substance behind it. There are lots of elements that, while they seemed inexplicable in the theater, make more sense when I think about it more. Unfortunately, the film is very dialogue-intensive, and I don't think English subtitles can really do the concepts involved justice. It might be worth watching, but the risk of getting trapped in "Young Artists" thematic morass is real enough that I can't give it a genuine recommendation.

This review was written by William Schwartz as a part of HanCinema's PiFan (Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival) coverage.

"Young Artists" is directed by Kang Taewook and features Lee Hyo-jeong-I, Hong Se-eun, Shin Joo-hwan and Cha Doo-ri.

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