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[K-Movie Night] New Year Blues
by Dramaddictally
Welcome to K-Movie Night — a once-a-month feature where we microwave some popcorn, put on a face mask, and get cozy with a Korean movie from yesteryear. With so many films finally streaming (with subs!), now is the time to get caught up on all those movies we missed featuring our favorite drama actors.
Each month, we’ll pick a flick, write a review, and meet you back here to discuss whether or not it’s worth a watch. Super simple. All you have to do is kick up your feet and join us in the comments!
MOVIE REVIEW
We’re ending the year with a lighthearted rom-com that’s set to a Christmas backdrop and also pulls together so many of the drama actors that lit up our screens in 2023. If you’ve been keeping up with our Year in Review activities, you’ll recognize most of the faces in this ensemble cast as a lovely little recap of our year in dramas.
We started and ended 2023 with Yoo Yeon-seok in The Interest of Love and A Bloody Lucky Day, and sandwiched in between we saw the likes of Yoo Teo (Love to Hate You), Yoo Inna (Bora! Deborah), Lee Yeon-hee (Race), and Sooyoung (Not Others), among many others in this feel-good film. There’s nothing artsy here and no awards to mention, it’s just a celebration of another drama-watching year gone by and a hopeful anticipation of all the goodness 2024 might bring us.
Full of clichés but easy to watch and relax into, the movie introduces us to four couples whose stories loosely intersect in the final week of the year. Set up as a seven-day countdown to New Year’s Eve, we open with a proposal, a breakup, an engagement, and a divorce. While we really need more than a week for all these struggles to unfold, the movie’s quick cutting between storylines makes up for it, allowing us to sit back, turn off our thinking minds, and take in all the romance that’s burgeoning and breaking down.
What’s interesting in the setup is that we have two couples seemingly on their way to happiness — one with a shiny new ring and the other blissfully engaged and moving on to wedding plans — but these are the two that will ultimately face the bigger struggles in love. On the opposite side, the two women who start out in dissolving relationships will go on to form the heart of the sparky love stories. So, by the end, we don’t just see divorce, but also moving on from it. And we don’t just see marriage proposals, but also the difficulty of actually forming a union.
We open on a snowy mountaintop for the World Para Snowboard Championships, where RAE-HWAN (Yoo Teo) is about to take first place. He races to the finish line, hops over the fence towards his fans, and pops the big question to his girlfriend, OH-WOL (Sooyoung). It’s all yeses and smiles, and our overjoyed couple seems to be on their way to a lovely life, until the problem of expectations rears its ugly head.
We learn that Rae-hwan lost his leg from the knee down at the age of four, moved to Germany with his family, and came back to Korea as an adult to train as a national athlete. Now, even though he’s acing world competitions for snowboarders with physical impairments, he has no sponsorship and faces discrimination both as an athlete and a person who grew up abroad.
Oh-wol is happy with their relationship, but Rae-hwan wants to give her more. “I feel small being next to you,” he tells her at an expensive dinner he’s paying for but can’t really afford. Oh-wol — who’s just witnessed his new agency using her “normalness” as a way to market him to the masses — gets up from the table and leaves. “You have no idea what I really want,” she says. And we suddenly have a very real relationship dynamic on our hands.
Our second story follows JIN-AH (Lee Yeon-hee) as she’s coldly dumped by her boyfriend of six years (cameo by Choi Siwon as the grating and comedically awful breaker-upper). Jin-ah feels herself reeling and needs a reset on life, and so, she picks the first and furthest place she can find: Buenos Aires, Argentina.
There, she meets the expat vineyard worker and wine delivery man, JAE-HUN (Yoo Yeon-seok), who has his own harrowing tale for why he left Korea. The two start off on the wrong foot, but soon find themselves roaming the street markets of San Telmo and taking a road trip to Iguazu Falls — where they scream out all their anger at the world into the crashing water.
As the two get to know each other, spending a week together in the South American summer, Jin-ah witnesses how Jae-hun built a new life abroad and gets a taste of what the world can be like if she just lets herself open up. At the same time, Jae-hun considers what he could be missing out on back home.
Couple number three contains yet a third intercultural dynamic with a Korean tour operator, YONG-CHAN (Lee Dong-hwi), engaged to a Chinese woman, YAO-LIN (Chen Duling), who speaks no Korean. The initial problem is that Yong-chan’s noona (Yeom Hye-ran) is trying hard to hold it all together as the head of their family, but suffers terrible anxiety about not being able to communicate with Yao-lin, as the three live in the same house.
Watching the two women learn to communicate even though they don’t speak the same language is the heartwarming part of this thread. But watching the couple deteriorate as Yong-chan hides important information about a recent financial fraud that’s toppled his business is infuriating, if all too rooted in reality. “What am I to you?” Yao-lin shouts when she learns the truth. Yikes. She’s already an outsider in the country, and now he’s made her an outsider in their relationship.
Our final couple (which somehow ended up being my favorite) meets when the woman, HYO-YOUNG (Yoo In-na), is seeking a restraining order against her husband during their divorce. JI-HO (Kim Kang-woo) is the cop assigned to protect her, and as he follows her through her daily activities, the two start to make each other smile.
When we meet Ji-ho he’s living alone in a small apartment, addicted to his work, and four years post-divorce. In a scene that resonated a little too well, he’s home alone on Christmas when he receives a text. Oh, who could be wishing him a Merry Christmas? It’s Home Mart, hoping he’s having a fine time with his family and loved ones. It’s not really funny, but it’s right on the money. With that kind of loneliness, the journey from exasperated at work to exasperated in love feels all the more satisfying.
After the setup, the film follows all its complicated couples towards their relationship resolutions. But the second half develops a wonky pace as it moves past the initial fixes and onto extended (and mostly trite) endings. It’s a lot to take in with so many stories in such a short time, leaving everything a bit too superficial to produce any real feels. Still, while it’s not the most memorable, and I didn’t laugh out loud, it’s a feel-good romance that definitely had me smiling with its light tone and upbeat approach to life.
The cultural themes also reverberate, even though they’re mostly unexplored, as the characters compare life in Korea to Germany, China, and Argentina, laying out the hardships of discrimination, working conditions, and intercultural relationships. The highlights for me were the scenes in Buenos Aires (even if the storyline there might be the most cringey) and watching Yoo Yeon-seok play a tango-dancing, Spanish-speaking local. Hearing him swear in Spanish when he’s chasing down a pickpocket pretty much made my night.
Plus, the sunset tango on a rooftop that winds up landing our couple in a very K-drama-esque fall into an almost-kiss, leads us to this gem: “I thought I was having a low point in my life, but I was just having a siesta.” The takeaway? “Next year, let’s be happier than this year.”
Join us in January for the next K-Movie Night and let’s make a party of it! We’ll be watching Juror 8 (2019) and posting the review during the last week of the month.
Want to participate in the comments when it posts? You’ve got 3 weeks to watch! Rather wait for the review before you decide to stream it? We’ve got you covered.
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