Working class dramas are in short supply in Hollywood right now so I'm turning to 1950s South Korea for some bleak realism today. The movie is Yoo Hyun-mok's Even the Clouds Are Drifting, an effective story about a pigtailed teenager (Kim Yong-ok) whose family goes deeper into poverty when her coal-mining brother (Park Sung-dae) loses his job. Thank the goddess, things will eventually take a turn for the better once everyone starts reading the orphaned girl's diary: her brother, her teacher (Han Mi-na), her best friend (Jo Hyeon-ju), and the boss's eldest daughter (Jo Mi-lyeong) — who fortuitously has contacts in the publishing world.
In no time flat, this plainspoken memoirist is going to become a best-selling author! But before that happens, the girl's makeshift family must be broken apart, forcing her and her younger brother (Park Gwang-su) to shack up with a drunken uncle (Choi Nam-hyeon) and his unsympathetic wife (Jeong Ae-ran). As if she needed to accumulate more hardship as raw material for her book! I can't wait to read the chapter in which she shatters an ivory statue of an abstract female deity. Is that what it takes to get a prayer answered?
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