When Life Gives You Tangerines: The K-drama by the author of Fight For My Way, now on Netflix, is another intimate, romantic masterpiece about a couple with an adverse fate. The protagonist is the idol IU, who confirms herself as a splendid actress after My Mister
Lim (or Im) Sang-choon, the screenwriter of When Life Gives You Tangerines, now on Netflix with four episodes a week is one of the best K-drama authors - perhaps the best after Kim Eun-sook of v - around. We discovered it with Fight For My Way, we had confirmation of it with When the Camelia Blooms, it was confirmed again with this raw and melancholic melodrama that does not let itself be pigeonholed.
Between period and slice of life, between dramedy and love story, When Life Gives You Tangerines is bittersweet, poetic, hard, sweet and supremely romantic, as only an immense and infinite love like the one that unites the protagonists can be. The series, impeccably written, interpreted and directed, is set - but then time and space change - in the 60s on the island of Jeju.
As in Lim's other works, the protagonists are two young people destined to fall in love, both gentle but combative, poor but ambitious, beautiful but oppressed by a petty and heartless society, unlucky in life but lucky in love. What is different is the budget - very substantial for a story that is neither a grandiose historical drama nor a promising high-concept blockbuster - at the service of a "small" and intimate story.
Gwang-Rye (Yum Hye-Ran, The Glory) is a haenyeo or a female underwater shellfish diver. A widow with three young children, she dives into the waves, risking her life every day to keep her family from starving. She lives on the edge of poverty, destroying her health with backbreaking work. She is not even thirty years old, but her face shows twice that.
Her story, like her existence, is exhausted in the span of two episodes, but her legacy is fundamental: she is - with her sense of family, sacrifice and resignation, her strength and resilience, her dignity and the total sweetness of her maternal affection - the personification of the values that animate When Life Gives You Tangerines.
The protagonist is Ae-sun (IU, My Mister), her daughter, a hungry little girl that no one wants to welcome or help. Tossed around from her stepmother to her uncles, she fights for survival and to be accepted in a merciless and suffocating society for women. She dreams of attending school and becoming a poet, rebelling against her destiny with determination and desperation.
However, it is not true that Ae-sun has no one on her side: Gwan-sik (Park Bo-gum, Love in the Moonlight) is the crybaby and clumsy peer who secretly brings her food and has adored her since childhood. Handsome and athletic, kind and sensitive, taciturn and tender, he is blindly loyal and totally in love with her.
He will always be the only one who will never try to tame her. More than a boy, he is a Labrador, or perhaps more of a wolf cub, because after choosing the partner he wants to spend his life with, he stays by her side and protects her for her entire life. Together, the two face an unfair life experiencing constant injustices and difficulties that break their bodies but never affect their love, honesty and principles.
The idol IU, who had already proven to be a sensational dramatic actress in My Mister, disappears in the character of Ae-sun, she is consumed in her passion, in her fragility and in a desperation that, when it explodes, breaks the heart. Her opposite, Park Bo-gum who had shone in Reply 1988, is contained, stoic, and devoted to an acting that only lets feelings and internalized struggles shine through.
As in Fight for My Way and When the Camelia Blooms, with When Life Gives You Tangerines Lim manages to stage the story of two lovers in a neorealist slice of life with tragic overtones without losing its sweetness and irony, without making it sugary and pathetic (but, tearjerker, yes, keep your tissues handy) maintaining a superb balance between realism and poetry and dispensing a message that is as anachronistic as it is revolutionary for the era we live in - the social era of absolute egocentrism: life has meaning if you live it for others.
This is the message conveyed by the choices of Ae-sun, a dreamer who has given up on personal fulfillment to focus all her perseverance on ensuring her children realize their dreams. A sumptuous writing and cast are supported by a production of a similar level. The direction by Kim Won-suk (My Mister, Signal) is prestigious but discreet; The series' art director and production designer is Ryu Seong-hie, a regular collaborator of Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook.
She is at her best when the action moves to Busan: it almost feels like plunging into a crowded and picturesque metropolitan scene from a Wong Kar-wai film. The beauty of the landscapes of the wild volcanic island of Jeju is vivid and dazzling, immortalized by moody and changing photography that becomes soft and tenuous when the story focuses on the tenderness of love, chiaroscuro and sharp when reality becomes more brutal.