You know that feeling when something
you’re looking forward to doesn’t live up to your expectations?
Well, the first two episodes of Secret Love Affair made
me feel the exact opposite.
I
watched and admired both A Wife’s Credentials and
End of the World, the
other recent dramas made by the writer and director behind Secret
Love Affair. But this new show
is the first time I feel as if they’ve set out to do what I really
want: Tell a love story. Those other series were great, but they were
primarily about bigger things, which meant that their romantic
plotlines had only secondary importance. This time around, the
relationship between female lead Hye Won and young pianist Sun Jae
feels as if it will be the driving factor behind most everything that
happens in the show.
In
some ways, this is a case of the right drama at the right time: I’ve
watched a lot of fluffy romantic comedies lately, and they’ve left me hungering for something darker. SLA is
exactly that, both literally and figuratively. It takes place in a
drab world of blacks and grays that are only sparingly punctuated
with warm, buttery yellows. Its every scene feels like an epic
battle between how things look and how they really are.
All the details in this drama feel lovingly constructed and intelligently
conceived—from the camera angles to the amazing lighting to the
telling set direction and wardrobe. Its storytelling is sophisticated
and reserved, but even two episodes in it’s easy to see that the
groundwork has been laid for a narrative roller coaster ride full of
great, surprising things. Like A Wife’s Credentials, this
is a show that will play with our expectations of Korean drama,
taking the kind of insane, over-the-top plotting we’d expect and
wrestling it down to earth through a deeply felt script and naturalistic
performances.
And
oh, the performances. The people behind Secret Love
Affair have a repertory theater
thing going on—they’ve already worked with many of this show’s
actors. The actresses behind female lead Hye Won and her assistant
played sisters in A Wife’s Credentials. Park
Hyuk Kwon, here playing Hye Won’s bratty husband, has actually been
in both of their other dramas—in A Wife’s Credentials
he played a philandering jerk,
and in The End of the World he
teamed up as an evil bureaucrat with the man playing Secret
Love Affair’s chancellor
(i.e., Coffee Prince’s
Mr. Hong). Thanks to their obvious comfort working together and the
capable direction of Ahn Pan Sook, the actors are doing the kind of
nuanced, unaffected work you hardly ever see in Korean dramas.
While the
younger actors are newbies to the team, they will more than do their characters justice if Yoo Ah In is any indication. His
hotness is certainly one reason why I can’t tear my eyes away
whenever he’s on screen, but another reason is that he’s giving
this unassuming, boyishly naive character enough gravitational pull
for a planet. It’s no wonder Hye Won will fall in love with
him—what woman could be unmoved by his stirrings of puppyish
devotion?
It’s a bit early
to know for sure what this drama’s end game will be, but for now
Secret Love Affair is a riveting exploration of passion,
connection, and the perils of living something other than a genuine
life.
***
I was disappointed
to realize that Dramabeans isn’t recapping this show. I could
really use their help understanding a drama this subtle, and I always
love having their general impressions of each new episode before I
can watch it. Alas, it is not to be, and I certainly can’t recap it
myself. I just don’t have the time or the skills (I’d write a
thousand words about somebody’s hair and then miss key plot
points). But out of respect for this show’s layered storytelling, I’ve
highlighted some of my favorite scenes from the premiere episode and
tried to pull apart their many levels of meaning.
(Spoilers to episode 2.)
(Spoilers to episode 2.)
