Drama Review: Ma Boy (2012)

Grade: A-

Category

Gender-bending school dramedy

What it’s about

The new girl at school is assigned a mysterious roommate, who happens to be a famous star of television commercials. (And a boy pretending to be a girl.)

Drama Review: To the Beautiful You (2012)

Grade: B-

Category

Cross-dressing romantic comedy

What it’s about

The fourth Asian drama to be based on Japan’s Hana Kimi manga series, To the Beautiful You is the story of an American girl who moves to her Korean homeland in hopes of inspiring her favorite angst-ridden athlete to return to competition. The catch? Her big plan to spend time with him involves pretending to be a boy and attending his boys-only boarding school.

Initial impression

I hate to admit it, but 15 more episodes of this and I will be a happy girl. It’s the perfect, breezy mixture of zingy chemistry, teen melodrama, and goofy comedy. (Okay. I could have done without the banana peel bit. Has anyone outside of Looney Tunes ever actually stepped on one and slid like that?) But then again, I’m always a sucker for high school shows, even if I’m officially old enough to be skeeved out by the shirtless infants prowling around the locker room. Try again after the puberty fairy visits, boys.

Final verdict

If you’re looking for a youthful drama that’s cute, cuddly, and cotton-candy delicious, To the Beautiful You is just the ticket. If you’re in the mood for something that accurately represents any aspect of life on planet Earth or includes things like logic or nuanced characterization, you should keep on going. 

There’s nothing particularly good about this show, but thanks to its likeable characters and sweet OTP shenanigans, it managed to be a fun diversion with just enough narrative momentum to keep me coming back week after week.

I’m also happy to report that To the Beautiful You actually has some emotional weight and tackles some of the thornier concerns gender-bending dramas so often ignore (memorably including “where should I hide my tampons while living in all-boys dormitory?”). Its idol leads do a reasonable job of carrying the show, but TTBY’s real heart and soul is its second male lead, Cha Eun Gyul. Played by an professoinal actor with a slew of credits to his name (how novel!), Eun Gyul often seems to have parachuted in from some other, better drama. The rest of the characters are thinly drawn at best, with seemingly no lives or motivations beyond the claustrophobic world of Genie High.

Flawed as it may be, this empty-calorie treat is light, bright, and full of sly references to the cross-dressing Kdramas that came before it. Watching it may barely require consciousness, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time if you—like me—are happy to overlook some serious missed opportunities in favor of goofy fun.

Random thoughts

• Episode 1. I tried not to watch this show, but it turns out that I’m even more defenseless in the face of gender-bending dramas than I originally thought. Also, was that just a patented Go Eun Chan bang-blow? I saw what you did there, Show, and I liked it.

• Episode 1. Stop the presses! Did they just acknowledge the existence of menstruation with a shot of the female lead hiding boxes of pads in her dresser? There may not be much originality in this drama, but maybe they’ll finally explain how a girl in disguise is able to share a room and bathroom with a boy for an entire school year without getting tripped up by bodily functions. I sure hope she invested in boy’s underwear, at least, or laundry day is going to be pretty awkward.

• Episode 1. Sangchu, will you be my pillow? You look like you’d be soft and cozy, a welcome change from the vicious wolverine that passes for a cat in my household.

• Episode 2. So where does your average all-boys school come by female cheerleaders? Are they gisaengs? Is there a girl’s school across the lake? Also, I keep cracking up every time someone tries to make the high-jump seem epically important, and/or trips the female lead. You’re a puppyish laugh-riot, Show.

• Episode 3. Excuse me, but are you eating a hamburger with a fork and knife? You may pass as a boy, but nobody would ever believe you’d spent any time in America.

• Episode 3.

Dear Kdrama Overlords:

If you ever need English-language proofreading, I’m just an e-mail away. I’d be delighted to help clarify, for example, the not-insignificant difference between the words “lunch” and “launch.”

Sincerely,

Amanda

• Episode 4. So I like a melodramatic rescue just as much as the next girl, but there are some problems with the follow-through this time. That creepy boy is edging from serial rapist territory to serial killer territory, yet you don’t report his actions to the police? Or get PTSD? Really?

• Episode 5. Show, I love you so much that I’m totally going to overlook the fact that you just left a kitten in a building slated for demolition the next day. And also that said building was still packed with furnishings—wouldn’t somebody have bothered to move them out before D-day?

— Is it my imagination, or is the character of Cha Eun Gyul essentially one big Coffee Prince joke? There’s his name, for one thing, and in episode 3 he said “let’s take this as far as it can go” while heading off to confront the female lead. How Choi Han Gyul-esque!

• Episode 8. I think this show sets some sort of record for slightly closeted gays in Korean entertainment. Not only is there lip-gloss boy and his intense man-crush on Cha Eun Gyul, there’s also the doctor, who had just as much trouble tearing his eyes away from Jae Hee’s smoking hot brother as I did.

— It gives me warm, fuzzy feelings that Jae Hee and her stepbrother are so loving. On the other hand, I’m a little concerned that he’s the first love who taught her to make s’mores. (Poorly, might I add: the whole point is to get the marshmallow charred and hot enough to melt the chocolate.)

—Dear Kdrama Overlords:

I know this show is based on existing source material, but I really think you should consider letting Cha Eun Gyul get the girl in the end. Both leads are cute, but he and Jae Hee clearly belong together.

Sincerely,

Amanda

• Episode 9. Listen carefully, Show, because I’m only going to say this once. I like you. No . . . I love you!

—Did I mention that I love the cheesy little “woosh!” sound the shooting stars make? Like so many things about this show, it’s so lame it’s actually awesome.

• Episode 10. Only in Korea could writers use tampons and porn stashes as props to enable chivalry. Why finding a pile of girlie magazines didn’t encourage the teachers to search the room more thoroughly is beyond me, but I guess it has something to do with the principal’s urgent desire to examine the contraband in more detail.

• Episode 11. Cha Eun Gyul! You are the second bravest, most wonderful character in all of Korean drama. I can’t believe what you did just did, and it kills me that I know how it’s going to turn out.

— Does not compute: Tae Joon can leave campus to buy digestives, but Jae Hee can’t leave to buy tampons. Or is Shangchu actually some sort of Tampax-sniffing guard dog trained to protect the boys from PMS?

—Okay, Tae Joon. The jig is up—stop torturing poor Jae Hee and tell her that you know she’s a girl. Whatever your motivation may be for keeping silent this long, watching her suffer like this is cruel.

• Episode 13. I’ve got the first order of business for South Korea’s new president to consider: making it illegal to store flowerpots anywhere above the ground floor. It would be a lifesaving piece of legislation, clearly.

— The kid who plays Tae Joon is a fine actor, until he reaches beyond his abilities and tries to do something crazy—like express emotion. Then he starts to seem like an extra from the movie The Polar Express, a film notoriously panned for the mechanical nature of its animated characters.

• Episode 14. Way to jump to conclusions Eun Gyul. If I saw someone all wrapped up like that, my first thought would not be “Holy crap—are you a girl?’ It would be “Holy crap, did you break a rib or something?”

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The holy quartet of gender-bending Kdramas:  Coffee Prince, Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Painter of the Wind, and You’re Beautiful

Heartstrings, for its youthful and fun summery vibe

Oh Boy: Gender-swap Dramas and Gender

 

I’m a total junkie when it comes to gender-bending Kdramas, so I was shocked at how negative my initial reaction was to the new drama short Ma Boy, in which a boy pretends to be a girl. 

I haven’t gotten around to watching the show yet, but something about the promotional materials really squicks me out. Is it because the male lead looks so masculine, in spite of his flowing locks and flirty schoolgirl uniform? Is it because he doesn’t look masculine enough, and instead falls into the uncanny valley between genders? Or is it just because boys pretending to be girls on screen tend to do so in the name of comedy, while girls pretending to be boys generally explore issues of identity and liberation from the established social order? It’s the difference between Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire and Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry: one is amusing, madcap slapstick, and the other is a wrenching portrait of the little boxes people are trapped in by the expectations of others.

I think this distinction is rooted in the ugliest aspect of our understanding of traditional gender roles: Men are defined by self-determination, power, and control, while women are defined by how they look and the quality of their relationships with men. When a girl pretends to be a boy, she inherits all the rights and privileges inherent to that gender, which makes great fodder for storytelling. On the other hand, when a boy pretends to be a girl, he’s taking a step down the ladder of social hierarchy, and his sphere of influence shrinks from the whole of human endeavor to the constricting circle home and hearth. The tone of gender-swapping dramas is set by the things their characters stand to gain through their deceptions: Girls pretending to be boys attain freedom, while boys pretending to be girls are gifted with mascara and impractical footwear.

And speaking of impractical footwear: femininity in Korean drama is almost always a carefully studied performance, not a physical state of being. It requires both specific props (like lipstick, designer purses, and indecently short skirts) and specific dialogue (including whimpers of “Ottokae” and “Oppa”). When a woman pretends to be man, these things are stripped away—the hair, the make-up, the frilly dresses. In its very nature, pretending to be a boy is an act of exposure, of nakedness against the world, which is why it so often leads to thoughtful, introspective dramas. But playing a girl (whatever your gender) requires the drag-queen-ish addition of female-specific items and rituals, leading to lots of jokes about underwear and the horrors of high heels.

Take the heroine of Coffee Prince, my favorite of the gender-swap Kdramas. Although Eun Chan never sets out to live as a boy, at their first meeting the show’s male lead assumes that she must be a guy. She doesn’t “perform” femininity like the other women he knows: she has a low-maintenance haircut and wears clothes designed to be practical, not girlie. From Han Gyul’s perspective, how could Eun Chan be a girl, when she isn’t defined by her chic wardrobe and willingness to bat her eyelashes to ensnare a man? As their relationship grows, skin-deep markers of womanhood aren’t what he comes to appreciate about Eun Chan. Instead he sees her as an equal, an ally, and finds in her in her all the noble traits traditionally associated with masculinity: she’s strong and capable and brave. Throughout Coffee Prince, Eun Chan is too busy being herself to be a Kdrama drag queen—which is exactly why Han Gyul and I love her so much.

It’s true that not all girls pretending to be boys are the focus of thoughtful dramas that explore the meaning of gender and identity in the modern world. The Beautifuls come to mind here, in particular—as fun as they are, the female leads of You’re Beautiful and To the Beautiful You gain very little from their gender-bending. Sure, they get behind-the-velvet rope admission into the clubby world of men, but what do they do with it? Jae Hee, To the Beautiful You’s female lead, seems to spend most of her time doing laundry, making snacks, and standing behind her man—she’s acting more like a mom than a boy. Still, their shows don’t exist solely to mock them. The same can’t be said for most men pretending to be women.

I Do, I Do: “But I see real girls doing this all the time!”

Two of this year’s urban rom-coms included unexpected moments of male cross-dressing, both inspired very specifically by the male characters’ need to create products for women. I Do, I Do’s apprentice shoe-designer thinks his skills will be improved by knowing what it’s like to wear high heels; 12 Men in a Year’s famous novelist wants to gain insight into his female characters. Although both characters are well-meaning, their distaff experiments are played for laughs, and their costumes—big, cartoony women’s clothing and Ringling-Brothers-ready makeup jobs—fool no one.

That men would pretend to be women is a logical extension of the Kdrama tradition of gender-bending. As far as entertainment value goes, I’m not crazy about this fad, but just the fact that it exists indicates that people are really thinking about what gender means in our lives and our world. And that’s a good thing.

REPORT CARD: 
Cross-dressing Kdrama Girls

Painter of the Wind, Moon Geun Young as Shin Yoon Bok

There were times in the course of this show when I forgot its main character was a girl. This is at least partially because it was the first drama I’d seen Moon Geun Young in, but beyond my lack of familiarity with the actress her overall demeanor and utter lack of girlie embellishment totally worked as a boy. And while she’s a compelling screen presence and has an interesting look, Moon Geun Young isn’t really a beauty—which actually comes in handy when you’re playing a girl pretending to be a boy while wearing unforgiving sageuk headgear. Grade A

Coffee Prince, Yoon Eun Hye as Go Eun Chan

Having starred as an ultra-feminine princess in the drama Goong the year before Coffee Prince aired, Eun Yoon Hye had some serious challenges to overcome with her portrayal of Go Eun Chan. And overcome them she did, turning in a charmingly loose-limbed, open-hearted performance utterly devoid of any form of vanity. Her physical presence as Go Eun Chan was a revelation—gangly and slouching, she really seemed to be a different person, who might actually pass as a boy. Grade A

To the Beautiful You, Choi Seol Ri as Goo Jae Hee

This show’s greatest gift to lead actress Choi Seol Ri is that it’s set in high school—a time before testosterone really kicks in and when a lot of actual boys look pretty girlish. With an appropriately masculine (but still cute) haircut and wardrobe, her baby-faced prettiness is not so far beyond the realm of possibility for a 15-year-old boy. As an added bonus, the script gamely hands her specific opportunities to convey boyishness, most notably when she dressed as a girl in episode 4 and nearly flashed half of Seoul before she remembered that skirts require their wearers to sit with their legs closed. The jury is still out on this one, but let’s give it an optimistic Grade C+

Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Park Min Young as Kim Yoon Hee

When most of the male characters in your drama wear what amount to flowing, hot-pink dresses, masculinity can be safely judged on a sliding scale. Park Min Young lowered her voice a pitch or two and brought to the role of Kim Yoon Hee a prickly energy and puffed-out chest. But while her cute-as-a-button face is the stuff of Pixar’s wet dreams, it ensures that she’ll never play a believable boy. (All that lip gloss didn’t help, either.) Grade C

You’re Beautiful: Park Shin Hye as Go Mi Nam

How do you know Park Shin Hye’s character is only pretending to be a boy in this show? She uses slightly less hair gel and wears slightly less make-up than her male counterparts. When you’re a post-Bowie rock star, gender-bending tendencies almost go without saying. But with a ladylike wardrobe and script that offered nothing more than vapid airheadedness (no matter what gender she was playing), Park Shin Hye was out of luck. Grade D

Drama Review: Coffee Prince

Grade: A+++

My initial viewing of Coffee Prince was like a first kiss with someone I really, really liked: there were bells and rose petals and choruses of angels. (Seriously.) And this is the reason I’m completely incapable of objectively evaluating this drama—I just love it too damn much.

Originally airing in 2007, this Kdrama classic is the story of Ko Eun Chan, a tomboyish girl who passes herself off as a actual boy when a moneymaking opportunity presents itself—being pretend "boyfriend" to the dreamy, spoiled Choi Han Gyul. Throughout 17 episodes worth of trials and tribulations, family and food, the two slowly realize they're meant to be together.

Purportedly there are pacing problems toward the end of this series, likely due to a mid-run episode extension, but this letup in narrative tension didn’t impact my enjoyment of the show even one tiny bit. In fact, I would gladly watch a hundred completely narrativeless episodes of Coffee Prince, just to spend more time with its cast of characters: Grandma plays card games (while miraculously recovering from caner)! Han Gyul attends a business meeting! Eun Chan stubs her toe!

As far as I’m concerned, there are pretty much endless reasons to like this show. But an aborted viewing of Triple, the follow-up effort of Coffee Prince’s creative team, drove one thing home: without the outlandishly charming Yoon Eun Hye, Coffee Prince probably wouldn’t have been as fun to watch. Triple’s lead comes off as shrill, shallow, and obnoxious; yet playing a similar character, Yoon Eun Hye manages to be high energy and goofy while still giving Eun Chan depth and texture, making her someone you’d like to know.

I’d seen Princess Hours before watching Coffee Prince and had some difficulty imaging how the same actress could be in both: she seemed far too pretty and feminine for someone who passes as a boy. Was I ever wrong—with the right outfit and haircut, Yoon Eun Hye really did look like a guy. And unlike many other gender-bending Korean actresses, she didn’t stop there. The way she walked, the way she sat, the way she moved, all were suddenly replaced with the loose-limbed, slouching mannerisms of a teenaged boy.

As Han Gyul, Gong Yoo was another marvel. His magnetism and easy charisma were a perfect fit for the character, a chaebol playboy who approached the world around him with winking, open-hearted delight. Whether he was wooing his grandmother or pointing out Eun Chan's gender to random strangers on the street, it was impossible to take your eyes off him.

And when the show’s melodramatic plot threads heated up—“How will I ever win his heart looking like I do?” “But I’m a man and I love another man!”—both actors were more than capable of handling the situation.

Usually, crying in Korean dramas involves a few tears gracefully tracing a path down an actor’s cheek. But when faced with confessing her character’s true gender to Han Gyul, Yoon Eun Hye took the complete lack of vanity she showed in Coffee Prince one step further, and cried like a real person with a broken heart, gasping and shaking and snotty and in general looking like a hot mess.

The scenes of longing scattered throughout the show are tender and lovely, but Coffee Prince’s plot hit on another aspect of love often overlooked in television shows—Eun Chan and Han Gyul genuinely enjoyed spending time together. Their relationship wasn’t all confessions of undying love and insurmountable obstacles: it was playing with Legos, brushing their teeth together, and goofing off at work, all while talking about anything and everything that came to mind.

This sense of genuine respect and friendship between romantic partners doesn’t appear all that often in Korean drama, but when it does gender shenanigans are often in the offing. The wonderful Sungkyunkwan Scandal is another example: while spending time together as “boys,” its leads fall in love as fully-drawn and complete people, not as genders. Pretending to be a boy allows these girls to step outside the expectations of their society and be appreciated for who they actually are, not what their gender defines them as.

In a similar vein, I love that Eun Chan is a little feminist (whether she realizes it or not). She doesn’t want to rely on a man for the rest of her life, and even after Han Gyul has made it clear he’d be happy to support her family, she works hard to provide for them with her own abilities. Even when she marries Han Gyul, it’s clear that Eun Chan is going to be more than just his wife: she’s going to be his partner.

As a westerner, I also appreciate that the characters in Coffee Prince actually touch: playful shoves at a shoulder, tying other people’s ponytails, and even falling asleep in your cousin’s girlfriend’s lap. (However uncool that may be, whatever continent you’re on.) These things make the relationships seem more relatable and casual—nobody in this show is afraid of being near anybody else in this show.

This also comes to the forefront in the big love scene toward the end of the series. In the few dramas I’ve seen that actually acknowledge that their characters are having sex, the girl seems to be only grudgingly involved. (See, for example, the final episode of Sungkyunkwan Scandal.) She consents actively but usually looks more terrified about what’s going to happen than excited. This is not at all the case in Coffee Prince. Eun Chan might be nervous, but the look on Yoon Eun Hye’s face as Gong Yoo backs her up against the door and sweeps her into his arms tells the whole story: she wants to be with him just as much as he wants to be with her.

So for my money, Eun Chan and Han Gyul share the single most sublime love in all of Korean drama. But there’s more! The second leads are also great, and their tumultuous relationship only adds to the show’s contemporary, grown-up feel: Their lives have been entangled for ten years and they’re casual and comfortable companions, just like the leads. Their storyline is compelling and perfectly handled, overlapping and complementing the show’s primary plot.

Even beyond the two lead couples, Coffee Prince’s supporting cast is invaluable to its cracktacular appeal. The coffee princes are economically but thoughtfully drawn, each with his own motivations and desires. It’s a pleasure to watch their friendships build as they interact, especially when dim-bulb Min Yeop decides to protect Eun Chan’s honor in assorted silly ways.

Add to this embarrassment of riches the earthy air of sensuality that runs throughout the show, along with its naturalistic styling, beautiful settings, and amazing, globe-spanning soundtrack (which I’m listening to right now), and the result just might be my favorite television show of all time.

Fundamentally, Coffee Prince is made of the same old Korean drama building blocks: it includes chaebol–Cinderella romance, birth secrets, and a family’s attempt to break up the lead couple. But what it does with these building blocks is something altogether different: It creates a window into a warm, cozy world of blue skies and bright sunshine, a world that feels like our own, but ever so slightly better.