Reel Tastes & Travels – a light dose of entertainment to wake you up

There are two main things I look for from any romcom – strong chemistry between the leads, and ‘awww’- inducing scenes between the couple. And so far…I’m not blown away on either front (perhaps an unpopular opinion). 

The premise is promising enough – a multilingual interpreter (Joo Ho-Jin) and a newly minted A-list actress (Cha Mu-hee) find their paths crossing time and again. Eventually he ends up interpreting for her in her work and the spark of romance ignites as their lives get more entwined. But the series premier felt all over the place with disjointed storytelling and some backstory set-ups that went on way too long while others felt barely touched upon. 

It starts in the present day where Mu-hee is wrapping up filming on a series with a Japanese co-star (Hiro). Ho-Jin is translating but gets caught out when Hiro suddenly confesses his feelings to Mu-hee. We’ll have to wait to see what happens next because the action now shifts a year back to Mu-hee and Ho-Jin’s first meeting on an island in Japan. Honestly, this felt like a contrived attempt to inject some drama and hook viewers early on. But any romcom fan knows that while there is usually a second male lead to muddy the waters, the main couple will prevail. So this is not quite the cliffhanger it’s meant to be. Rather than drawing me in, I felt like I had been dropped into the middle of the story with no context and worse, no reason to root for the main couple over the second male lead. In my opinion, it would have been better to just directly start with the meet-up in Japan and let the story unfold from there. 

Taking a cue from the serial and jumping back to the start of their story, Ho-Jin (who’s pining a lost love) runs into Mu-Hee at a restaurant where she’s come to confront her ex-boyfriend’s new Japanese girlfriend. She enlists his help to translate and is crushed to realize how completely her ex has moved on. Not quite a meet cute given the circumstances but a decent springboard for a new romance in theory. However, the scene drags on for much too long with Mu-hee veering back and forth between confronting the girlfriend and running away. Meanwhile, they don’t seem to know quite what to do with the girlfriend who swings dramatically from an endearing helplessness (even willing to let go of her supportive boyfriend if Mu-hee is who he truly wants) to villainess territory when she cruelly portrays her relationship as the true long-standing one with Mu-hee cast in the role of the sidepiece who temporarily separated them. There’s absolutely nothing to explain this bizarre change – it’s as though the makers of the series suddenly realized that the scene was proceeding too smoothly and required some drama to push Ho-Jin and Mu-hee together. Hence the sudden outburst of cruelty which offers Ho-Jin the chance to step up and comfort Mu-hee. This leads to the pair spending the rest of the day together before they separate. 

We then get another awkward transition (presumably a few months later) where Mu-hee is wrapping up a new movie. Unfortunately, an accident on the last day lands her in a coma and after some undefined passage of time, she wakes to find the movie has gone viral and she is now a superstar. And… scene!

The first episode just felt clunky. There were nuggets of a promising story, but it got mired down in poor editing, weird tonal shifts, and a pronounced lack of romantic (or even semi-romantic) tension between the leads. I was almost ready to give it up but the series does have an 8.1 rating on IMDB, so I decided to give it another shot in the hopes that it improves. 

And does it? To a certain extent yes. We see Mu-hee coping with her sudden superstardom. Although the culmination of her dreams, the suddenness of it all is causing considerable anxiety and she is hallucinating her break-out character Do Ra-mi everywhere (which is even more terrifying than it sounds when you realize that her big break was in a horror movie!). Sounds like a manifestation of imposter syndrome. Since she was in a coma, she didn’t have time to adjust to the success and woke up an overnight (in her perception) sensation, with all the attendant demands and pressures that entails. 

In the midst of all this, Ho-jin turns up again to ask her to take down a photo of him from their day in Japan (since he doesn’t want the girl he was pining over to realize he was there). Man, is he unlikeable in this episode. It’s quite clear that Ho-Jin has a soft spot for him which is understandable given how he helped her when she was arguably at her lowest. It’s also understandable that Ho-Jin is not in a place, mentally or emotionally, to pursue anything with her. But he gives her so many mixed signals through this episode that I just felt sorry for her by the end. I don’t know if he’s just socially awkward or clueless about relationships but it’s hard to root for him as the male lead when there have been so few moments of charm from him so far. The show also provides so little information about the girl he is obsessed with and their relationship that his interactions with Mu-hee feel a bit disingenuous, rather than the actions of a man deep in the throes of unrequited love, who is starting to slowly recover without yet realizing it. Hopefully, this changes as he gradually opens up to Mu-hee.

Initial Impression: Glimmers of promise but (so far) lacking the charm that is so important to any good rom-com.

Stray Musings

• The second male lead, Hiro, certainly got a swoon-worthy entrance, swooping in to catch Mu-hee when she almost faints at TIFF