Directed by JUNG So Young, whose earlier film Love Me Once Again defined Korean melodrama, Lost Youth falls between the so-called hostess movies of the late 1970s and the full-fledged erotic movies of the late 1980s. With a screenplay written by JUNG’s longtime collaborator and master of melodrama KIM Soo Hyeon, this movie shows the director deliberately catering to popular trends in the 1980s by incorporating explicit sex scenes into his signature brand of sentimental melodrama. Released the same year as The Ae-ma Woman, Lost Youth nonetheless betrays the conflict between JUNG’s melodramatic goal of depicting Myeong Ja as a sympathetic, innocent woman and the erotic goal of showcasing high-octane sex scenes. Myeong Ja, who flees to Seoul to escape her abusive father, is raped at the factory where she works and devolves into a pickpocket. Damaged yet upbeat and passionate, Myeong Ja becomes involved with the impotent Mr. Han. She thus follows the conventional characterization of 1970s hostess movies, while the overall story of a woman with a past who dies of a brain tumor just when she’s about to find happiness follows the romantic, sentimental narrative of melodrama. But the forced premise—that Myeong Ja cures Mr. Han’s impotence and inspires him to love—appears to be a mere device for amping up the sex. In particular, uniting a man rendered impotent by his wife’s death with a sexually-uninhibited young woman tends to place the moral blame for sexual expression on the woman. (CHO Hye Young)