January 5, 2021

Even the Clouds Are Drifting: From Hard Luck to Hardcover

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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