Busan 2024 Review: THE FINAL SEMESTER, Youth Enters the Workforce in Empathetic Korean Indie
Four years after her layered character study A Leave, director Lee Ran-hee returns to the Busan International Film Festival with her sophomore film The Final Semester, a film that also examines the professional struggles of the trade-bound working class.
While her first film followed a middle-aged carpenter, here she looks at the lives of several vocational students as they embark on the tricky transitioning from school to factory life.
Chang-woo and Woo-jae are guided by their teacher, who helps them to secure placement in a company and suggests what kind of paths are open to them during these sensitive early steps of adulthood. Certain jobs may offer them an opportunity to be exempt from military service, others could help them obtain a subsidised spot at a university, but all of them will teach them about the hardships of the adult life they are about to be thrown into.
When they do settle on a particular factory, everything seems alright at first. The working conditions are reasonable, their manager appears to have their best interests at heart, and even the cafeteria food is palatable.
Despite how things seem, however, the surly silence exhibited by Seong-min, another vocational student who has been working at a company for several months and who is good at his job, hints at a different story.
The Final Semester dives straight into the minutiae and complexities of the Korean vocational training system and the process these students will need to navigate before becoming full-fledged workers, all the way down to the various salary steps they will go through if they stick to their positions.
While this information dump runs the risk of overloading the viewer, in effect it helps us to get into the headspace of these young and inexperienced characters and understand the confusing environment that they are being pushed into. They have to trust what adults are telling them, but as the story progresses, these young protagonists come to learn that adults don't always have their best interests at heart, especially when the loyalty of those adults is to a company -- a company that employs a lot of young workers because no one seems to be able to stick around there for very long.
The Final Semester's world of working class youths and vocational training is reminiscent of July Jung's sensational Next Sohee, but while that film used the background to enrich an involving mystery that involved a death and a police investigation, Lee Ran-hee's film is all about the process and how it can shape young and vulnerable minds.
Among the film's strengths are the portrayals of the teenage characters who shine through clearly thanks to naturalistic performances. The interplay between Chang-woo and Woo-jae is particularly interesting. They are youths with very different personalities who share a believable friendship that is put to the test when their environment suddenly changes.
Chang-woo is diligent and loyal, and despite his young years seems to take his situation and future seriously. However, he's also a little dim and is chastised for working slowly. His actions are also dictated in part by his mother's struggles. Despite his trials, he eventually finds something he is good at, which gives him something to latch onto. Woo-jae is more proud and rebellious, quickly losing patience with people he doesn't feel are treating him fairly. His adjustment to the company is far less smooth.
With The Final Semester, Director Lee paints an affecting and empathetic portrait of youths who are locked into a reality dictated by systems beyond their control and the pressures of those around them.
