Belying its banal title and its origins as a government-commissioned project, Time To Be Strong dares to peer behind the Korean entertainment industry’s glittering façade and offers humane, and heart-rending drama about three still-beautiful yet battle-hardened twentysomethings trying to recover their youth and their raison d’être after the implosion of their pop careers.
Bolstered by a nuanced performance from its cast – especially Choi Seung-eun, who starred alongside bona fide Korean megastar Song Joong-ki in the Netflix film My Name Is Loh Kiwan – Namkoong Sun’s accessible yet subtle second feature merits a strong run on the festival circuit after its triple award-winning premiere at the Jeonju International Film Festival.
Much has been said and written down the years about the cut-throat nature of Korean show business and how it feeds on its young: many a media report has described, sometimes in the most vivid and lucid terms possible, the toxic environment pop stars have to contend with and the deadly, devastating consequences this has brought about. Somehow, it’s an issue that has rarely been addressed in Korean cinema as such – the result of an omertà, perhaps, an unadmitted collusion against something that might torpedo the upbeat factor defining K-pop.
And along comes Time To be Strong, a film depicting the unhappily-ever-after of a trio of twentysomethings who were forcibly “retired” from their pop groups, as they flee to a far-flung tourist town to take stock of their new existence and the price they paid for their brief and brutal brush with fame. While Namkoong’s antipathy about the mores of the entertainment industry is very much evident, the film isn’t mere tubthumping. It’s first and foremost a very humane study of three young people grappling with their loss and grief in very different ways.
Devoid of convenient flashbacks or cliched melodrama, Time To Be Strong stays with the characters in the here and now throughout the film, as Namkoong’s screenplay slowly and subtly untangles the protags’ myriad traumas through their encounters with locals, who are surprisingly sympathetic towards their city-slicker woes. We never get to see what the young stars were like at their heyday or the way they slide painfully down the slippery pop-pole, a bold move on Namkoong’s part as she relies heavily on the ability of her cast to bring about the complexities of their characters.
The film begins with the protagonists arriving on Jeju Island with their luggage in tow but their minds seemingly still elsewhere. In a voiceover, Sumin (Choi Seung-eun) questions her ability to come to terms with her new routine: “Will we ever fit in again?” Indeed, their struggle to find the way out of the airport is perhaps symbolic of an inability to navigate real life. Plucked out of high school and placed on the pop treadmill ever since, they know nothing about leading ordinary lives. In fact, they have envisaged their trip as some sort of compensation for what they have missed in their youth, the ritual graduation trip they never got to go to because of their careers.
A former leader of a K-pop “girl group”, Sumin cuts an embittered and forlorn figure, her Queen Bee traits serving to distract others from her struggle against bulimia. In stark contrast to her glumness is her former high-school classmate Tae-hee (Hyu Woo-seok), once a boy band heartthrob, who still revels in entertaining strangers with his cheery pop-idol schtick. Finishing the triumvirate is Sumin’s former groupmate Sarang (Ha Seo-yoon), who never unplugs herself from her headphones and seems perennially lost to the ether.
Settling into their holiday bungalow, Sumin and Tae-hee joke about how they should handle the impending days of “boredom” in the boondocks. But after an altercation in a restaurant, they are left with no money and are forced to find cheaper lodgings and temporary employment in a local orchard. But it’s also through this unfortunate twist of events that they discover redemption: firstly through the exchanges with fellow fruit-pickers, and then with So-yoong (Kang Chae-yoon), a fan of theirs who shows them how to have fun.
In place of explicit exposition about their past or reenactments of their glory days, Namkoong uses the trio’s conversations to reveal the abuse, exploitation and neglect that shaped their short careers, and their own anguish and guilt at having played along or enabled all those monstrous rules of the game. Namkoong and his DP Ki Sun-hyuk manage to make use of both beautiful landscapes and non-descript locations to present the characters’ ebbing mental state, like Sumin’s attempt to let off steam by racing around the tracks of an empty stadium– perhaps a visual allegory of her fear of losing her audience and her only calling in life.
Director, screenwriter: Namkoong Sun
Cast: Choi Seung-eun, Hyu Woo-seok, Ha Seoyoon, Kang Chae-yoon
Producer: Lee Sang-hyun
Cinematography: Kim Sun-hyuk
Editors: Choi Kyung-yoon, Namkoong Sun
Music: Byul.org
Production companies: National Human Rights Commission of Korea, Before We Die
Venue: Jeonju International Film Festival (Korean Competition)
In Korean
102 minutes
