Christmas in August

Christmas in August marks the point at which Korean melodrama’s “aesthetics of restraint” fully came into its own. By the late 1990s, the genre had begun to shed the sentimentality of old-fashioned tearjerkers: Chang Yoon-hyun’s The Contact (1997) signaled the beginning of that shift, while Christmas in August, released the following year, brought it to fruition. A lineage that may have begun with Bae Chang-ho’s Our Joyful Young Days (1987) finally finds its footing in this film. There is none of the reckless abandon of staking one’s life on love, nor the contrived tears drawn from the premise of a terminal illness. Instead, everything passes quietly, as though imprinting itself on the fabric of life. In the end, Jung-won dies, while Da-rim smiles at the portrait of herself hanging in the photo studio. This was director Hur Jin-ho’s first feature and the final film shot by cinematographer You Young-gil. Before his death, he said, “Only now do I feel I understand something about light.”(Kim Hyung-seok)