Drama Review: Spring Waltz (2006)

Grade: A+

As the Korean entertainment press is always eager to mention, people tend to have their own ideal type when it comes to prospective romantic partners. For me, this ideal tends to involve dreamy, shaggy-haired boys glistening with exertion behind a piano. It’s fitting, then, that my ideal Endless Love drama focuses on a tragic pianist who as a young boy gives up his whole identity to save the girl he loves.

Now that I’ve watched all four the dramas in this series—Autumn in My Heart (2000), Winter Sonata (2002), Summer Scent (2003), and Spring Waltz (2006)—I have a whole new appreciation for how Goldilocks must have felt in the traditional story. I may have tried them all, but until Spring Waltz none of them was quite right. Autumn in My Heart started off well, but veered into tragedy porn with a self-consciously miserable ending. Winter Sonata was a lot of fun, but was ultimately overstuffed makjang. (Just how many car accidents resulting in amnesia can any one drama hope to get away with?) And Summer Scent, no doubt attempting to follow the slow rhythms of summertime, was only slightly less boring than watching grass grow. (In fact, a huge portion of its running time was devoted to this very activity.)

Spring Waltz, on the other hand, is a sublime and swoony fairytale. It’s cotton-candy luscious and lovely and earnest, but also has just the right amount of gritty edge to keep it from being like drowning in an ocean of treacle. It encapsulates almost everything I love about Korean drama: it’s unapologetically sentimental, intensely romantic, and full of fated love. This kind of starry-eyed storytelling has all but vanished in the West, but I’m utterly susceptible to its charms, however uncool they may be.

If I were to use Dramabeans’ elegant two-part rating system, Spring Waltz’s score would look pretty wacky: objectively, I’ve got to admit that its quality is about 4 out of 10. But on my own personal scale of crack viewing, it comes in at an easy 11 out of 10. As far as I’m concerned, this show is what the Endless Love dramas could have been all along, if not for the soap opera–style melodrama that bogged down the former installments. The youngest, freshest, and liveliest of the series, Spring Waltz is a gorgeous, gleaming daydream of a drama.

In every way, Spring Waltz is better than what came before it, more steady and heartfelt and finely crafted. At last, the sets are beautiful enough to match the scenery; at last, the characters react in relatively sensible ways to the makjang world they find themselves in; and at last the ending won’t make you want to die, whether from disappointment or rage. (Amazingly, Spring Waltz even includes some kissing best described as hungry, an adjective I never thought would apply to anything in this well-mannered series.)

And while Spring Waltz’s pacing may be slow compared to today’s dramas, it’s not painfully so—as was the case with so many earlier Endless Love installments. Instead, it is set at the speed of real life, with just the right mixture of contemplative, silent scenes and narrative movement. The story feels measured and carefully rationed to fill the time available; it’s twenty episodes worth of plot fit into twenty episodes of drama. (This is in marked contrast with Summer Scent, which felt like three episodes of plot fluffed out to fill twenty episodes of drama. When watching it, I actually skipped from episode 7 to episode 20—and I’m pretty sure I missed nothing but pointless back and forth.)

I can see why Spring Waltz wouldn’t work for everyone, especially because its final five episodes fall victim to the awfulness characteristic of the Endless Love dramas—frustrating miscommunication, idiotic levels of secret keeping, and stupid decisions made for unbelievable reasons. But for me this show is about as close to perfect as possible: I always lean toward melodramas that make the mundane seem magical, and that’s just what Spring Waltz does. Its open-hearted tale of love and redemption takes place in a charmingly askew world filled with storybook castles and fields of sunshine-yellow flowers, peopled by gentlemen who gracefully accept second place and only slightly evil witches who eventually come around to the good side.

Like the other Endless Love dramas, Spring Waltz is breathtakingly well-shot and uses nature as a counterpoint to its actors and the manmade world around them: it’s a travelogue of beautiful places and lovely things (however narratively inert they may be). But unlike Summer Scent’s never-ending close-ups of flowers, Spring Waltz uses its stunning backdrops to enhance the action. Even better, someone finally realized that people are fair game: this show isn’t afraid to turn its gaze to its male leads. Their bodies are treated as natural marvels, just like the rainbows and sunsets that set Spring Waltz’s signature look. From muscular shoulders to miraculous cheekbones and sculpted hands, both Jae Ha and Philip are celebrated as objects of desire.

And speaking of objects of desire, I find it kind of funny that Daniel Henney was hired as Spring Waltz’s second lead. The rest of the actors are fine, but Henney really is the human embodiment of all the successes and failures of the Endless Love series. He’s beautiful and well-meaning and so likeable I’d give him a kidney if he asked for one, but his acting is on par with performances I’ve seen on middle school stages. (In fact, it might actually be worse.) Usually I’m immune to bad acting in Kdramas—I can’t understand the language, after all, and the performances are often intentionally stylized compared with what I’m used to seeing on American television. But when Daniel Henney is on screen, in all his drop-dead-gorgeousness, I actually do have the knowledge necessary to access his skills. And they make me cringe, unfortunately. He tries so very hard and I love him so very much, but hasn’t he earned enough as a model to pay for acting classes yet? (It must be said, though, that when it comes to his performance in Spring Waltz, part of the problem must be with its director and scipt. Henney wasn’t this bad in My Lovely Sam Soon: he may be called upon to do more heavy lifting here, but his performance is even more awkwardly lightweight than it was then.)

Seo Do Young as Jae Ha. Yowza.

Daniel Henney as Philip. Double yowza.

Of course, no discussion of the Endless Love dramas—Spring Waltz included—is complete without acknowledging the elephant in the room. However appealing it may be, this series is clumsily amateur in its production. The editing is occasionally bizarre, the costumes and sets are often off-the-rack and cold, and each and every one of its installments allows hanging microphones to intrude into a number of scenes. And let’s not forget that the scripts are full of holes and demand more suspension of disbelief than twenty Hollywood superhero movies.

But even if the Endless Love series doesn’t compare all that well to today’s more polished and professional dramas, it’s still a landmark in the history of Korean television. It was groundbreaking in its international appeal, and even now is seen as one of the foundations of Korea’s reputation as an entertainment powerhouse. (This, I suspect, is why the Endless Love shows are the only older dramas always available streaming on Netflix.) The series also has its own idiosyncratic pleasures: you can rely on these dramas to treat their characters as multi-faceted human beings, not cardboard cut-out plot robots. They all star women who are competent and talented, if prone to making foolish decisions for their men. And each spotlights a tender, bittersweet love story capable of leaving viewers teary-eyed and aching, even all these years after they originally aired.

Flaws and all, I found Spring Waltz to be a disarming delight that was far greater than the sum of its parts.

As a resident of northern New England, the weather in my state is often described as ten months of winter and two months of bad sledding. So I know what spring really is—a reward for having survived the times of seemingly endless darkness. And that’s exactly what Spring Waltz feels like, from its storybook beginning to its deliriously happy ending.

Read the brief review here.

Watch it on DramaFever.