May-June 2023: Liberation, Grief and Divorce

I ended up watching a couple of "sad people shows" ™ done in very different styles but both with a languid thoughtfulness.

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Summer Strike

I found Im Siwan very one-note in Run On so I was dragging my feet to see more of his work. But when I read Jae-hae Kim's review of his other shows I thought I should give him another try. I'm glad I did starting with this small town show with murder.  

Summer Strike is focused on a young woman, Lee Yeo-reum (Kim Seol-hyun) whose career and love life have not been going to plan. When her mother dies and leaves her some funds, she decides to quit working and live as frugally as possible until she figures out her life. In the non-stop achievement race in Korea, this is a radical departure. She finds herself in a small town with a library and decides this is the spot. She moves into a former pool hall where someone died (why it's been empty for so long and they are willing to give her a massive rent discount) and she begins this new life where she can unpack her grief. 

But small towns are not chock full of kindly, sweet folk and she finds a lot of people skeptical of her and her lifestyle and those who want to take advantage of her naivete. But over time she starts to form bonds with the quiet librarian,  Ahn Dae-beom (Im Siwan) who also quit his successful academic career in math, and a rebellious high school student Kim Bom (Shin Eun-soo) who is suffering with an alcoholic dad. 

As with the best of K-dramas, the ones where there is a strong ensemble behind the romantic pairs makes for a richer show overall.  There's a nice secondary romance where a single dad in town has always had a crush on the other librarian who treats him like the pal she had in high school. 

While I don't always love, romances with "and then there is a murder" but here the consequences and stakes of that feed into the past traumas of the characters and it becomes a powerful inciting incident which forces the characters to grow and change.  And there's no reason for the story to force a character to forgive an abuser. But sadly this is common in K-dramas. Grrrr. 

There are lessons to be learned about what is really needed to make for a happy life and it might not be the same for everyone. 

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My Liberation Notes

I'm not sure I have encountered a K-drama like My Liberation Notes. In a world of a lot of successful formulas, this one stands apart. 

Three siblings live at the end of the train line outside of Seoul and help their parents with their failing farm and small business. They have an extreme commute into Seoul for work and the dream of moving up in Korean society feels like it slips away every day.  They are mildly achieving corporate drones who don’t make enough money to move out of their family home nor start families of their own.

The youngest, Yeom Mi-jeong (Kim Ji-won), sees a billboard from her train every day that says “Something good will happen to you today." And it is almost never true. She is a contract worker at a company where her boss does not support her work and belittles her. Her older sister is Yeom Ki-jeong (Lee El) is unmarried, drinks too much, and is too honest causing all sorts of tension wherever she goes. Their brother, Yeom Chang-hee (Lee Min-ki) is angry and frustrated at his job overseeing convenience stores and thinks he can never marry because he will never have the money.  A strange man, Gu (Son Suk-ku), whose full name they do not even know  ends up on their doorstep and he begins to help out their father with his sink business slowly getting integrated into their every day lives while drinking himself to sleep every night. 

In another format, this would be a slow-moving indie film. But in the drama format, we get to spend ample time with each character and see their unique sadness. Gu is dealing with his grief, personal betrayals and alcoholism to numb all his pain. Chang-hee is so painfully aware of how stuck he is and he resents everyone else around him who is not. Ki-jeong wants to date a divorced colleague of Mi-jeong's but seems to screw it up at every turn.  Mi-jeong loaned money to a man who ghosted her and now she's buried under the weight to pay it back. She also finds Gu fascinating and forces herself into his life. 

The show demonstrates how life is hard, not always in grand or complex ways. Here it is the quotidian struggle of dealing with other people, loss, sadness and never moving ahead. These characters experience so many setbacks, embarrassments, and humiliations in just the small failures of life. Their small-scale failures feel real and the they have no choice but to keep going. 

And while this can sound depressing, the show ends up still holding onto some small flame of hope, as the characters do, that maybe tomorrow will be different. And they press on and in small ways try to change the direction of their lives.  We just ride the quiet, mysterious rhythm of the characters during their sweaty, buggy, hot days and snowy, dark nights while constantly perched on the edge of hope. 

What a unique gem. 

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Divorce Attorney Shin

In this story of a concert-pianist-turned-divorce-lawyer (Cho Seung-woo) who is very good at what he does, the real focus is his group of middle-aged male friends. They've known each other for so long and they understand each other more than anyone.  Romance is secondary to the friends who will drop everything for each other. It's quite sweet actually, even if sometimes they are immature idiots.