Christmas in August - Korean Melodramas

Korean Melodramas

Linda Williams analyzed the film Way Down East (1920) and wrote an essay "Melodrama Revised" noting five features found in current melodramas that have still remained relevant in Korean cinema:

• 1.) Melodrama begins and wants to end with a sense of innocence.
• 2.) Melodrama focuses on victim-heroes and their virtues
• 3.) Melodrama appears modern by using realism, but realism also gives passion and action
• 4.) Melodrama involves a balance of passion and action such as being "too late" or "in the nick of time"
• 5.) Melodrama presents characters with psychic roles and conflicts between good and evil

Christmas in August does not incorporate all of the features, and is missing the fourth and fifth one. However, leaving out the fifth feature had become common since the 1990s. This was because South Korea's authoritarian government, which advocated moral frameworks in film through censorship, had collapsed. Starting in the 1980s, filmmakers were able to make their work seem more modern by leaving out the conflict between good and evil.