This is exactly what I liked and expected nothing less from JTBC - a slow, but beautiful show about dealing with the past and the scars, with the vulnerabilities, loneliness, with our hideouts and walls we raise to protect ourselves.
It will be picture heavy because this series is just so beautiful.
Not much is happening here and yet the time passes, filled with deceptively slow life in a small city. Haewon comes back to the countryside to her Aunt to hide from the unpleasant happenings in her life. She may seem like a withdrawn woman but in fact she's very blunt. And her Aunt, also a very blunt woman and a free spirit, is less than happy when her niece comes to live with her.
Haewon is a product of the circumstances she had no control over - we know she learned both cello and piano and when she was in a high school, her life was thrown a curve ball. Her mother was accused of killing her husband and jailed for it. We don't know (yet) why she did that or what kind of a person the man was to warrant such an end. But this event stigmatized Haewon as a murderer's daughter and made a quiet girl even more so, and forced her to build a wall she could hide behind.
And in high school Haewon made one friend - Boyoung - who spilled her secrets about her mother. This created a chasm between two girls, and even now Haewon tenses up whenever the name of Boyoung is mentioned. She doesn't want to meet, she accepts none of the excuses that Boyoung gives for spilling the secrets.
I like the panoramic shots we are given here. The sense of space and the world around feels liberating after concrete, steel and glass walls of Seoul. As a country girl, I so much like watching this.
I expect people from outside messing with the slow healing and opening up process but that's how it is, right? We can never have it easy.
The narration, framing and even light used here flows like a poem having a certain rhythm, form and tone. If somebody doesn't like poetry, they probably won't like this series. And poems quoted here are mostly the real ones, so thank you for giving us Authors' names too.
The drama utilizes winter as an allegory for the characters here and their state of emotions. We get a lot of frozen water shots, be it the icicles or river, or frost, snow... The winter was a dead season among the country folks everywhere around the globe, where the winter actually was present. Little wonder how or why Persephone myth came about, right? Here we have characters who are frozen, in a sense, and we are observing how they can find a solace in another human being and thaw.
The stories and poems presented here offer a moment of a frozen time - the world outside the bookstore doesn't exist and it's easy to believe why the characters here await the weekly meetings so eagerly. Stories and poems offer solace, it's a calming embrace after life's struggles and everyone struggles, even though at the first sight people look happy. Haewon feels a bit envious but happy that Eunseop has a warm and loving family, and yet he's also a person that guards his innermost feelings closely. He doesn't live with his family, he visits the cabin in the mountain woods at night, he wanders the mountains alone. His solitude is different from hers but it's just as hurting.
The episode 3 had this dialogue:
- Some people never share their worries their entire lives.
- Even with their families?- Yes. Like saying it's too hard... or that it hurts too much. They never say such things and keep everything bottled up. Perhaps, until the day they die. They build their own cabin inside their hearts...
and never leave that cabin all their lives. Even when they feel lonely, they never admit it. Actually, they'd rather dwell in their loneliness. They like it more than their own families.
And now I'm suing for emotional damage.
Episode 3 also ended with Haewon's narration harking back to the Eunseop's favorite story told during the Goodnight Book Club meeting about the wolf's silver eyelash when she juxtaposed the lonely boy from the story with Eunseop after a panicked search for him in the woods. It's very telling that his favorite story tells about a boy who couldn't trust people and wanted to find one person who was who they seem to be but apparently, everyone was false around.
I wish I could do the same as Haewon - to just go someplace quiet to sort everything out and to listen to yourself, to winnow out all the unpleasant thoughts and memories and to make new, better ones.
I will write nothing more about the plot because I don't want to turn it into recapping which I always find the idea of it idiotic. Watch for yourself and immerse in the story.
There is also one thing I really like - the way of composing the shots - the characters are often seen through a framing - it can be a window, stairs, bookshelves, door ajar, from the ceiling angle, etc. It gives off a certain feel of voyeurism, it's like we're secretly observing the characters who are completely unaware of our gaze. I like such method, it adds a certain level of intimacy to the story that slowly unfolds before our spying eyes. Or the moment in a throwback to Haewon's childhood when she was lying in bed and camera seemed to be lying with her, but the moment she was getting up, camera moved 90 degrees mimicking exactly the girl's movement upwards.
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