Lost (인간실격, No Longer Human in Korean) is a forlorn and aching drama about characters who are all experiencing a throbbing sense of pain. Their suffering is as natural as their breathing. Their disappointments pile up when life isn’t what they expected. And yet they go on.
It’s a particular tone that’s hard to carry off successfully, and I think Lost succeeds about 95% of the time. It reminded me of My Liberation Notes, in a way, because the characters move in ways and in directions you do not anticipate. No one is quite what they seem. And you have to keep watching to make sense of it all.
Jeon Do-yeon plays Bu-jeong, a forty-something book editor and ghostwriter who has lost the thread of her life. She experienced a miscarriage and lost her job, but she has not told her family about her job. She spends her days cleaning people's homes and trolling the famous actress she ghostwrote the book for online. She sees her life as a complete failure and confesses this to her father (Park In-hwan). Nothing has gone as she planned, and she is filled with grief for a life she never had.
Meanwhile, her husband Jung-soo (Park Byung-eun) knows nothing about any of this. He thinks she is angry at him, and he just steps back to give her space to the degree that he no longer knows what she is thinking and feeling. He does not see her. She does not see him. This alienation is eating away at them, but they also never speak of it or do anything to change it. He is close with his mother, Min-ja (Shin Shin-ae), who endlessly nags Bu-jeong. Min-ja actively interferes to the degree that she is digging Bu-jeong's mail out of the trash and pasting it back together to find out what Bu-jeong is up to.
Bu-jeong unexpectedly comes into the orbit of twenty-something Kang-jae (Ryu Jun-yeol). He runs a "stand-in" service in which he acts as someone's friend, family member, or lover. He is handsome and mysterious, cultivating an air of the unknowable. He grew up poor and is very money-conscious. Everything he does is for money. He wants nice things and for his life to mean something. But he is not sure where his life is going either.
Kang-jae lives down the hall from Bu-jeong's father. But their paths cross in various ways, and this creates a magnetic pull that draws their two lives together.
There are all sorts of quiet intersections here. Kang-jae's best friend, Tak (Yoo Su-bin), lives with his sister, Sun-gyu (Jo Eun-ji), a pharmacist whose landlord is Min-ja. Sun-gyu's boyfriend works in the hospital ward where Jung-soo's first love's husband is dying. These coincidences reminded me of Cedric Klapisch's films. This is what happens in a community. And even in Seoul, small communities exist. It's like the person you see on your commute who you don't know, but after enough time you start to notice things about them.
Here, those closest to the characters are being lied to--literally EVERYONE is lying to the people around them--but the strangers see more of the truth. And these lies may start off as things you cannot believe someone would withhold, and then you see how much they are an act of love or protection.
No character is one thing. And as we make assumptions about them, those assumptions are dismantled. Take Min-ja for instance. She is practically a grotesque harpy of a mother-in-law who screams and carries on and demands attention--but as time goes on, we see her acting kindly, selflessly, or with regret for the things she has said and done. Jung-soo is this gentle man who tries to maintain peace with his wife and mother and acts with great devotion but is also drawn to someone he knows he cannot be with.
Kang-jae, at first blush, looks like a vain party boy who cares about designer clothes and being rich. But he is also this little boy who is trying so hard with his mother, who is still lost in her own cycle of poverty. His friend has died, and he wants answers. He is selfish and self-involved until he is compelled to help someone else, surprised by his own actions.
While the show does have scenes in daylight, for a while everything feels like it takes place at the end of the most exhausting day. The characters are spent and yet continue on. What could be more familiar than that?
There are a lot of voiceover monologues of text messages, notes, or thoughts in people's heads being played over scenes of other characters. There is a constant interlacing of audio and video as someone confesses intimate thoughts to themself about the actions of others. It becomes this web of intimacies. Scene after scene of people saying one thing and doing another. Of taking the smallest step towards someone else and waiting to see what the butterfly effect is.
In a way, nothing happens, but everything changes. I know I am being irritatingly vague, but I think the power of the show lies in discovering all the little details and nuances in these relationships as they build up over time.
The show takes its time, and I'm glad I stopped watching halfway through and started re-watching it from the beginning because I really needed to pay attention more carefully to fully understand the character dynamics and so much that was unsaid.
I'm not sure the series nails the finale, but the journey there is filled with fascinating characters, deep feelings, and true anguish that I am willing to overlook it.
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