Song Joong-ki (left) and Chun Woo-hee (right). Photo collage images: courtesy of tvN; JTBC.
My Youth is an upcoming K-drama starring Song Joong-ki and Chun Woo-hee alongside Lee Joo-myung and Seo Ji-hoon in key roles.
First off, what captures my imagination is the pairing of Song Joong-ki and Chun Woo-hee, followed by the two seasoned actors in a slice-of-life romance drama. Need I ask for more? Yes, releasing it this year—just wishful thinking since My Youth is expected to be released next year.
Plot-wise, it’s a love story about two individuals who were once very close but went separate ways until reuniting some ten years later, a watershed moment in their lives. With its apparent nostalgia, My Youth is surrounding love, loss, and the overwhelming feeling of reconnection after years apart—a portrait of how time, age, and experience affect people and their transformational capacities.
Song Joong-ki plays Sun Woo-hae, a former child star who once made headlines but fell prey to unsavory reasons, eliminating his celebrity over time to a stage where it paled into nothingness completely, recasting him as a regular Joe who nowadays works as a writer and florist. As much as time is a healer, it hasn’t been able to ease his past pain, so his current state of affairs isn’t as easy to do as it may look like.
On the contrary, Chun Woo-hee’s Sung Je-yeon is a riches-to-rags case whose life of luxury and ease was cut short when her affluent family unexpectedly experienced a downturn, turning her comfortable routine into a difficult one in which she now leads a team at work and strives ferociously for success and to put her life back on track. In an attempt and the process when she subsequently meets Woo-hae a decade later, she’s not up to much good and wants to make the most of the situation, triggering a disturbance in his life.
The experience serves as the narrative’s hook and adds a lot of intrigue to My Youth. From what I can sense, this story seems to have a way of catering to everyone’s search for happiness and an urge to find things that have gone missing. Here, memories and an itch to restore what’s lost are weighed against the truths of growing up and the changes that came about in the time in between. And, as Woo-hae and Je-yeon traverse such complexities and more when they reconnect, it becomes a world of polarizing and mixed emotions for them.
My Youth will be directed by Lee Sang-yeob, who worked before on recognized K-dramas like Shopping King Louie (2016), Familiar Wife (2018), My Holo Love (2020), A Piece of Your Mind (2020), Yumi’s Cells (2021), and Yumi’s Cells 2 (2022). If the stories that work are those that elicit strong reactions, then Lee’s filmmaking style reflects that. I’ve also noticed that he tends to avoid banal repetition or predictability in his works. I’m eager to see how that and his storytelling technique evolve in My Youth using Song Joong-ki and Chun Woo-hee’s excellent emotive details.
