New school… Tuition (1940), BFI Early Korean Cinema Season

This film was only rediscovered in 2014 in the Chinese Film Archive and of the dozen or so featured in this joint season of the BFI and Korean Culture Centre, it might well be my favourite. Based on a story by a fourth-grade schoolboy it tells the story of a similar boy’s struggle to get by in the face of poverty and illness. In comparison to other more overt melodramas, it offers the most naturalistic take on life under the Japanese whilst still offering a compelling and very satisfying narrative.

Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945 and by the forties, as tonight’s supporting feature Patriots Day in Joseon, showed, the province was being told to be more grateful and supportive of the empire as the Sino-Japanese war progressed through its third year. By this stage Japanese was the chosen first language and yet, Tuition, though originally scripted entirely in that language was re-written to include extensive sequences in Korean.

As if that wasn’t challenging enough it also showed the poverty that could affect even the most hard-working and able of families with a story in which a young boy is left looking after his grandmother as his parents leave to make money as peddlers. That hard work and ingenuity plus steadfast loyalty and love triumph in the end is one thing but these are not necessarily Japanese traits despite the warmth shown by the Japanese school teacher who is the only major non-Korean character.

Directed primarily by Choi In-gyu (Angels on the Street) and Bang Han-joon who stepped in after the former was taken ill, the film is very well-made and seemingly went down a storm both in Korea and Japan where it was praised for illustrating “… the possibility of Joseon filmmakers to produce art films unstained by commercialism.” This point gets to the heart of Tuition’s enduring appeal, it presents as an honest film, treading a path the makers wanted to and telling a sentimental tale with humour and astute observation almost as if the original intentions of the 11-year old writer had been fully carried through.

At one point our young hero, Wu Yeong-dal (Jeong Chan-jo) is arguing with his deadly rival, the smartest girl in the class, An Jeong-hui (Kim Jong-il), over wood they are collecting until they look down to see rice fish in the stream; they immediately stop and work together to catch them. Thus, are friendships made by a mutual fascination with nature whether it be free fishes or even just the cucumber plants Jeong-hui sketches; are you interested in science asks the teacher, “no, I like drawing…” comes the reply.

The film shares its young protagonists’ fascination with discovery and, culminates in Yeong-dal’s epic 24-kilometre solo walk to seek help from his auntie in which we share his brave delight in finding his own way across his country via foot, ox-cart and bus.

We first encounter the two friends-to-be arguing over a football in the playground and then competing to impress their tutor, Mr Dashiro (Susukida Kenji) in class. Jeong-hui outdoes Yeong-dal by drawing their town on the map of Korea fibbing that her father had taken her there on the train. She’s got front and that rubs the boys the wrong way but soon she and Yeong-dal are united by shared interests and their mutual difficulty in paying their tuition fees.

At home Yeong-dal lives with his grandma (Bok Hye-suk) who struggles at the best of times until she falls ill and he must care after her as the money and food begins to run out. He’s not heard from his parents in months and begins to give up hope as everyday the mailman passes them by. He begins to skip school even as neighbours pitch in to help and even when Mr Dashiro subs him the two dollars to pay his school fees, he ends up having to give it to grandma’s landlord… there seems no end to their poverty trap until, in desperation, grandma thinks of her distant sister.

Will there be a happy ending? It doesn’t matter when a film is this engagingly charming and when you already know that Mun Ye-bong was playing Yeong-dal’s mother, you can expect a big finish and the bucolic dénouement does not disappoint.

The acting from the youngsters is especially impressive and is credit to the direction and a generosity of spirit that still leaps from the screen. Definitely one to watch out for and proof that even in the dark days, creativity and hope continue to drive us onwards from the screen.

Mun Ye-bong - perhaps the major film star of the colonial period in Korea?