Where do homeless drifters and runaways go besides to the city streets? In Kim Hong-joon's mid-'90s indie Rosy Life, some of them crash at a sordid comic book store run by Madam (Choi Myeong-gil). As a small business manager, she barely scrounges up a life better than theirs. Profits are slim; prospects, even slimmer; rapes, likely recurrent. Perhaps that's why there's such a dependable market for the pulpy escapist fare crowding her cozy shop's shelves. You can only get drunk so many nights. Same for the Korean Flower Card Game. Same for getting laid. What one really wants is a purpose. Or at least a distr ction that doesn't lead to a hangover, debt or a venereal disease.
Not that anyone in this grim slice-of-life is likely to chase a dream. How do you envision a better life when everywhere you look sucks? And what you're wearing is so damned uncomfortable. For me, one signature component of Rosy Life is its wardrobe which appears to be nearly uniformly made of polyester. Seeing two young women walking through a marketplace or a couple of old guys playing cards in cheap duds made my skin itch. Fast fashion really has made being poor worse sartorially. Is it too much to ask for a fabric to breathe? In this suffocating underworld, apparently yes. And wearing a synthetic-leather bomber-jacket with a black baseball-hat and a pair of army-green painter's-pants usually means trouble (Choi Jae-sung). But is it the worst of it or the least of it?
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