kdmd

I have to preface the following comments by saying that I don't like these types of stories in general, the ones where you squirm as characters make mistakes and wrong decisions and pointlessly do bad things to each other. But the real difficulty that I had with the show is that it spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to be both a tragic love story between the ML and FL and a story of innocence and corruption and revenge within the prison of social convention. It is hard to do both. For the tragic love-story, we have to feel empathy for both parties, but that went on for so long, it messed with the corruption story. I imagine that they were trying to ensure both lead actors had robust, complex parts, but it messed things up. (If I thought that the US movie "Dangerous Liaisons" was trying to do a lot, this show unfortunately tripled the effort.)
Trying to lean into both the love story and the corruption gave the leads so much to do, that it seemed difficult for them to really lean into the aspects of the characters. One minute they were good, the next bad, with some redundancy. If the director didn't film in chronological order, I don't really know how the two leads were able to do it. It seems they are both focusing on meaty roles that expand, deepen, and challenge their acting skills. Great applause for both of them; they did a great job here.

One benefit of the complexity is that you don't know who the ML will wind up with in the end and you can go back to rewatch having a better understanding of what the ML and FL were actually feeling in the moment. I would definitely recommend rewatching to really see the acting of the two leads. I can say that the story is significantly changed from the book and movies on which it is based, with much of the change made to tell the story within historic Korean society structures, rather than French society.

Here and there, this show uses a movie technique of a God-like humorous narrator watching the futile, ineffectual efforts of man. It is ostensibly the voice of the town story-teller, delivered in a traditional Korean sing-song style, to narrate certain parts of the show. Unfortunately for people like me, it was intolerable and I had to turn off the audio when it came on. Worse, the frequently vulgar narrator, accompanied by comedic music, was used in some of the scenes showing the ML's sexual playboy lifestyle. I think this was to help shy, perhaps Korean, audiences overcome their embarrassment watching such scenes. But it was a total scene destroyer, and needless for the plot, which is essentially a tragedy, not a comedy. The use of this was a giant misstep by the producers and really prevented folks from feeling the true aching futility of the storyline. It created a distance from the characters that inhibited the viewers' emotions from being stirred.

Yes, there was some nudity, but it was not vulgar or extreme. It was there to reveal the ML's true feelings towards the two 2FLs and his actual humanity. This is because, since he was trying to fool people throughout, it was his behavior that revealed more than his words. And both of these two female actresses seemed a bit miscast to me, and didn't seem to fully inhabit their characters in a deeply relatable way. But this may be due to the complex script or because it may have been hard to find actresses willing to take on the nudity in these roles for fear of being penalized in the future.