A student experiences the grim realities of the workplace in July Jung’s chilling portrait of a generation of South Koreans let down by society
The future is not so much a prize to be seized by the young as it is bleak, foreclosed and unrelenting in this drama from South Korean director July Jung. Sohee (Kim Si-Eun) is a free-spirited high schooler with a fiercely independent streak and a love of dance. At school, her teacher pulls her aside and shares the good news: he’s found her an internship at a call centre. But the signs that she will hate the job are there on day one: during training, managers advise staff – all young, all female, all considered expendable – what lipstick to wear.
The film was inspired by a news story about a student who killed themselves while on a work placement, and one can sense Jung (who also wrote the script) has an interest in identifying institutions that fail young people in the real world. There’s Sohee’s school, more interested in chasing employment targets than student welfare; the call centre, with its exploitative practices; and, most omnipotent of all, modern-day capitalism, with its habit of shrinking life down to a brutal competition for survival.
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