A low-key, realistic youth drama, Flying Boys explores the lives of several Korean high school seniors with unclear paths ahead of them. Min-jae, our main character, is an average kid who lives with his airplane pilot father and apparently looks like he’d be a good student but isn’t. He has had a longtime crush on his neighbor Su-jin—a gifted girl struggling to make a decision about college— but he dare not confess out of the fear that he’d have to move to a new apartment when she rejects him.
The story gets going when Min-jae, two of his friends, and Su-jin, under different circumstances, are all forced to sign up for a community ballet class that they must deal with along with the typical problems of tests, college searches, love and parents.
Luckily, Byun Young-Joo doesn’t direct the film with the predictable idea of solving all the children’s problems through dance. The students don’t begrudgingly join, discover a hidden talent and have their future set out in place for them. The ballet class is only a piece of the entire portrait of the students’ crucial final year of high school.
Oddly enough, Flying Boys recalls Take Care of My Cat, another film directed by one of the few contemporary Korean female directors. The resemblance is not in content, but in execution, as Byun discards the straightforward plot in favor of a free-flowing exploration of each character’s ups and downs. Of course, the film has its share of applicable themes about youth, but it runs a bit lighter than other Korean youth fare often shackled with heavy-handed messages. Flying Boys is filled with comedy, romance, melodrama and everything in between making it easy to digest and get lost in the running time.
Although the actors work pretty well for the most part, they reveal some weaknesses later on. When the story takes dips into serious moments, the characters require emotional outbursts (that feel rather forced in context as it is), and the acting does not help to convince us otherwise. But still, despite the slight problems with the drama, Flying Boys comes highly recommended for anything from the nice soundtrack, the comedy, and all the interesting, honest characters with lives we want to learn about.
Reviewed by Tarun
