It took less than five minutes of watching Lee Byeong-Hun‘s South Korean coming-of-age comedy to know I was hooked. It didn’t take too long after that to realise that (subject to a drastic nose dive) this was going to be the film of the festival for me. It’s the film I’ve been eagerly waiting for, and I’d begun to give up hope of seeing anything like it, for this year at least. Get ready for the most charming and hilarious film of this years festival, Twenty.
Gyung-Jae (Kang Ha-Neul), Dong-Woo (Lee Joon-Ho) and Chi-Ho (Kim Woo-Bin) have been best friends since High School ever since getting into a fight over a girl. Since then, they have shared both big and small moments together to keep their bond strong. Now though, they’re all twenty and heading off in different directions in life. Gyung-Jae is going off to College, Dong-Woo has to spend a year studying for his tuition fees so that he can pursue his art, his passion in life, and Chi-Ho just wants to be young and sleep with loads of girls, behind his unsuspecting girlfriend, So-Min’s (Jung So-Min) back. The three friends continue to remain close during their personal developments as Gyung-Jae learns about love and coming out of his shell, Dong-Woo learns about the struggles of life and having to let go of his dream to help support his struggling family, and Chi-Ho learns that life isn’t the fun little playground he was hoping it would be.
Twenty just ticks all of the right boxes. It has a wonderful cast, some genuinely enduring, lovable and complex characters and, as you would expect from a coming-of-age story, all the reminders about the rigours of life wrapped around a huge amount of laughs. The comedy is onconsistently on cue for the entire two hours here and you’ll only find yourself stopping for moments of reflection during the more important moments of the film.
All three young leads stand tall in the film, working well off each other with great chemistry and the film’s co-stars Jung So-Min, Lee Yoo-Bi as Gyung’s younger sister, So-Hee – who has a developing crush on Dong-Woo and Ch-Ho’s love interest, a young aspiring actress Eun-Hye (Jung Joo-Yeon), provide strong support for the leads and the story.
If, like me, your thing has always been more of the happier, lighter stuff in film, then Twenty is an essential watch for this year’s festival. It’s a poignant reminder about the difficulties of leaving your teens behind and accepting that life just isn’t going to be as simple as it once was. It’s not just one of the better films in the festival, it might well be one of the best films (and certainly most enjoyable) I’ve seen since covering the New York Asian Film Festival over the past 3 years.
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