Express News Service
In Twenty-Five Twenty-One—written by Kwon Do-eun and directed by Jung Ji-hyun—Min-chae stands in because the viewers. She is Na Hee-do’s teenage daughter, fallen out of affection with ballet and her mom in a single shot solely to run away to her grandmother’s residence. She stumbles upon her mom’s diary entries and coaching logs (a fencing gold medallist) transporting us to late 90s and 00s infancy. Min-chae gasps at hanging moments in her mom’s love story and feels cheated by cliff-hangers. Just like us.
A romantic drama has no enterprise having this many plot twists and cliffhangers however 2521 does and is all the higher for it. It’s the story of Na Hee-do (Kim Tae-ri) and Baek Yi-jin (Nam Joo-hyuk), their friendship and love, their companions in Ko Yu-rim (Bona), Ji-woong (Choi Hyun-wook) and Seung-wan (Lee Joo-myung). It has all of the dramatics—a touch by means of the airport and a gold medal falling off a desk in gradual movement. But extra.
The sequence is concerning the ephemerality of youth, it talks about means of rising up by slowing down the timelapse, it shows an off-the-cuff disregard for anhedonic pursuits and underlines these completely happy recollections that may very well be studying curves. Multiple occasions within the sequence the characters behave in egocentric methods and provides themselves credit score. Hee-do and Yi-jin go their separate methods early on to both get items of life collectively or to make goals come true. As Hee-do places it, it’s certainly about how generally being egocentric could be a thoughtful factor to do.
The sequence begins with South Korea’s IMF disaster of 1997 and the financial and social privations intensely felt by our younger to a fault coterie. The setting varieties a bedrock to write down characters past their age, feeling and experiencing conditions they’re far too tender to expertise. Yi-jin is compelled to rebuild his life with one foot into his twenties and a protracted line of collectors in his household’s wake. Hee-do is comparatively unaffected, but it surely takes the toll on her mom with a profession in information just for the fencing prodigy to fend for herself at eighteen.
The late 90s when know-how was just a few light-years out of the pocket and but inside grasp makes the tribulations confronted by characters shifting. Suddenly, lengthy distance—like just a few hours’ drive from the town—is on the far finish of a rainbow and measured in painful minutes and miles. A cell phone is an costly reward for folks of restricted means and the caller ID is a characteristic that would have saved somebody from embarrassment. It provides extra time to deal with their hurting as a substitute of what’s occurring round them.
This is the type of background data that provides excessive stakes to Hee-do and Yi-jin’s friendship and eventual love story, their relationship constructed on tiny measures of kindness, a far greater accomplishment in comparison with the ironic distance coupled with bodily intimacy and existential dread immediately. It could be quaint, however actual. When they’re consensual in selecting the form of like to co-exist in, it rings true. When they really feel actual ache due to one another’s actions and but again one another in methods few do, it rings true.
The arcs of Ji-woong and Yu-rim and the lonesome however dissident disposition of Seung-wan supply a welcome perception into appreciating the current. The first two are hopeful in love, the latter seldom sways from the bigger image. It’s a bond that holds the group collectively, a bond that’s hyperaware of the lives they’re main whereas appreciating the teachings realized on the way in which.There have been lots of theories concerning the drama’s arc adopted bypolarizing response to its fruits. But nothing comes near the little moments of pleasure that Twenty-Five Twenty-One was capable of muster. Like the way it managed to converge a woman and a lady inside Hee-do—largely because of Kim Tae-Ri’s efficiency and the writing—by no means infantilized by anybody round her. Or the momentary shot of Yu-rim and Hee-do rubbing Ye-ji’s head earlier than their teammate’s ultimate fencing match as she quits the game which solely makes you surprise—why is quitting no more romanticized in popular culture?
Together they embody Hee-do mantra—turning tragedy into comedy as a coping mechanism. It is tough to not be consumed and enthralled by the present’s mixture of bleakness and cheer, of a direct urge to understand days passed by. “Control the distance”, they’re taught in fencing. Hee-do and Yi-jin usually are not star-crossed lovers, they’re hardly tragic. They are two individuals who needed like to last more than themselves and instinctively knew that controlling the gap was the one approach to obtain it.