Summer Scent (2003)

O Foolish Heart

‘Summer Scent’ is the story of Min Woo, a man, an architect who has lost his love, Eun Hye, who died in tragic circumstances on their wedding day; he is completely devastated and decides to give up everything and move to Italy, to try to forget, to try to get by.

After three years, however, he decides to return, after all he is an architect and has a family in Korea, maybe through work he has overcome the trauma, maybe he has forgotten Eun Hye;
‘Did you meet any girls?’ his best friend and co-worker Dae Poong asks him, ‘No, no girls’ he replies, ‘I tried to stay alive’ or something like that, says Min Woo, who seems yet another desperate case of tele-filmic misogyny.
He's bound to be your first love and that's it, there's no other possibility of new love....

But since all this stress has to be relieved somehow, Min Woo decides to go to the mountains, to one of those beautiful peaks surrounding Seoul, and at the top of the mount he meets Hae-won, a beautiful florist who is there to document rare plants and species;
Hae-won is not only a florist, but also a girl who has also been ‘reborn’ because she has undergone a life-saving operation, a heart transplant that now allows her to live a ‘normal’ life; she has found love, at least she thinks so, with Park Jun Jae, who has been her rich boyfriend since her school days, she is full of vitality, she wants to make up for everything she lost in her youth, in hospital rooms and deprivation, only the moment she meets Min Woo, her heart begins to stir and send her messages... And what could it be! ?

Due to a minor injury suffered by Hae-won, the two are forced to spend the night together in a small cabin in the mountains, not in the biblical sense eh, it's still a drama, but as two travellers who will say goodbye to each other the next day; only in this short time Min woo detects a variety of particularities of Hae-won that remind him of his deceased beloved...

‘Sometimes I feel like there are two people living inside me,’ thinks Hae won often, who of course still doesn't know it, Min woo doesn't either, but the heart beating in his chest is that of Eun Hye, Min Woo's deceased love; sounds familiar!?

Of course it is, in a nutshell it's the premise behind Return To Me, the lovely movie starring Minnie Driver and Dave Duchovny, so there's a good basis for a nice love story, but of course this is a drama and here things get terribly complicated, because on the horizon there's also the intrusive Jung Ah, who loves Min Woo without being corresponded, she too has returned from Italy to follow her (desperate) love;
‘She's like a little sister to me,’ says Min Woo, and this is the final nail in the coffin for any chance of a relationship between the two in the Dramaverse; but Jung Ah also happens to be Hae-won's best friend and sister-in-law by extension, being also Jun Jae's sister...

What a mess! But it's a pretty good mess, indeed...And we're only at the beginning!

Greetings and goodbyes and everyone goes back to their homes, end of drama, right?
But of course not, because Park Jun Jae and his family have to restructure a resort and this will take them the whole summer; architects are needed for the restyling and guess who, out of 11 million Koreans living in Seoul, a city agglomeration of 25 million (practically half of Italy) and who knows how many thousands of professionals who will win the project?
Obviously Min Woo and his partner/friend Dae Poong who will find themselves working throughout the season with Jun Jae, Jung Ah, Hae-won and even Jang-mi, Hae-won's Unnie, a sort of bizarre ‘stalker’ who collects photos of good-looking men...

Min woo and Hae-won, after the initial surprise and embarrassment, become closer and closer...

Over the years, I have resumed watching ‘Summer Scent’ several times and with different moods, even having been busy to translate the subtitles, but to this day, this drama of the Seasons cycle is the one that gives me the most headache;
towards the last episodes of the drama, there is a scene during which Hae-won and Min woo get together and confront each other, bringing into focus what I think is the moral dilemma of the drama:
Hae-won states that her love is destined to remain hopeless, because she believes that Min woo continues to love the late Un-Hae, who is alive in her trasplanted heart...

‘Summer Scent’ is then the story of a man who continues to love his dead girlfriend through another woman who is a kind of empty shell, a ‘wrapper’ or ‘container’!?

From the very first encounter in the mountains (the sequence at the airport is only an introductory frame and indicative of the subsequent dynamics), one undoubtedly has the feeling that the authors want to ‘trick’ us into confronting the dilemma of ‘who’ or ‘what’ acts as the fulcrum of the attraction between the two younger.

Is it Un-Hae's heart that ‘plays’ with feelings through the calla flowers, Schubert's ‘Serenade’, the flower petals in the tea, the references to rain in the clear sky, the house with the glass roof, introducing a pure fantasy subtext, so as to increase the spectrum of eventualities!?

It is Min woo who, desperately, projects the image of his deceased beloved onto Hae-won, even going to the extreme of recreating with objects and soundtrack an eerie ‘ideal scenario’ in the proposal room at a dramatic moment in the story!?

Or perhaps, much more conventionally, ‘It's destiny... If love is predestined your heart will beat fast even at the slightest touch’, as the more mature Jang-mi argues in an exchange of views with her florist friend...

Perhaps the beauty of this drama lies specifically in its unresolved narrative linearity, in a sort of enveloping haze - as in the sequence, beautiful! at dawn, near the house of Min woo's mother, a sequence that generates one of the many ‘misunderstandings’ that will later provide the definitive ‘proof’ of ‘guilt’ - a haze that does not allow us to clarify all the sentimental implications of the two main characters, but personally, much more prosaically, I like to think of a circle -the classic circle of destiny, yes- that opens with that beautiful initial consideration of Eun Ha and, ideally, closes exactly on the very final sequence:

‘...If my heart still beats when I am older, I want to meet the love of my life on a rainy day...’

‘Summer Scent’ has various flaws, but also many virtues that make it really attractive still after all these years, starting with the easiness of small gestures and the essentiality in the pursuit of building memories by two sincere souls who, inevitably, find themselves alone against the world.

The encounter in the mountains, the beautiful hills with the endless tea fields, the proposal room, the football pitch with the scene of the silent dance, the flowers, Schubert and his ‘Serenade’ also in the beautiful version by Nana Mouskouri (it must be said that Schubert did not exactly lead a blameless life...), the ‘forced’ stop on the island, all those extraordinary little things that make life worth living, those objects, sort of love fetishes that take on a central role in their lives, as well as that ‘slow’ rhythm, apparently not much appreciated by many viewers, but essential for contemplating and getting in tune with the central role of nature that, once again, underlines the work's magical lyricism.

And then all those big walks; throughout the summer, Min Woo and Hae-won do nothing but go, alternately, to Un-hae's poor parents who have gone to bury their despair in the middle of the woods, to grow all kinds of tea and to get there, or to Un-hae's grave they are forced to constantly grind miles; how can one not love these two pure souls and their yearning in the midst of those landscapes! Does such dedication not deserve due repayment?

It is yet another classic premise - two people whose existences are conditioned, who are not allowed to live their love - based on a possibly implausible event, (but aren't all melodramas ‘extraordinarily implausible’!?) which nonetheless leads us to ask; ‘Who governs the feelings! The heart or reason!?’

Perhaps not the best of the four segments, for it certainly isn't, it pays a little for the lack of an introduction, the powerful and well-articulated preamble, which, at least for my personal taste, usually takes up a couple of episodes and serves as an ideal building block for pathos. But these are small details, and ‘Summer Scent’ has a great cast:

Son Ye Jin, so beautiful and moving both in her enthralling joie de vivre and in the heartbreak following the unveiling of the truth, with the relative and inevitable sense of guilt towards ‘her’ family, with a split personality (‘You know, after the surgery, my personality has changed’ she tends to repeat) that makes her doubt even herself ('Is it me or is it Un-hae who rules me! ?"), she has all these intense close-ups that as soon as her eyes begin to moisten you're already starting to cry, not because it's a drama and therefore plays the easy pathetic card, but because every time she puts her hand on her chest you're afraid it's going to break -yet- her sweet heart, absolutely stunning!

Ye Jin finds a perfect partner in Song Seung-heon who, possibly because of the summer look with tan and rebel hair, looks even younger than in Autumn In My Heart; he too is messed up badly (the subject matter, in itself, provides for this) and unable to give Hae-won the sincere reasons for his love, evidently tormented by doubt, for much of the drama, about the sincerity of his own feelings (‘At first I was attracted to you because you looked like Un-hae’) he really is a soul in pain.
I mean, Min Woo, do you love Hae won!? Or his simulacrum!?

I absolutely adore the scenes and dialogues between the two main characters; we move from an initial phase, where Min woo has an attitude of almost controlled superiority towards Hae-won, where the first skirmishes are mostly dictated by frivolous situations, to a sort of role reversal, as the story proceeds and the truth comes out, with the beautiful florist reaching a greater awareness and determination, compared to a Min woo sinking into the darkest depression, definitely worn out by his inner turmoil.

Remarkable Han Ji-hye, in a crabby and obnoxious character, that of Jung-ah, the hopeless lover, able to make herself even ‘ hateful’ in her behaviour towards her almost sister-in-law friend, but also capable of pissing off Min-woo several times with her petty tricks to try to win him over; As I often like to say, when an actor (woman, man is indifferent) makes me angry about his or her role, it means that he or she has done his or her job very well.

Ryu Jin's work as Jung Jae is also well articulated, I would say unpleasant as well, for much of the drama, with his arrogant feudal-like sense of possession and his unbelievable coercions towards Hae-won, at a distance he brings out unexpected aspects of his own personality.

Jo Eun Sook (Jang-mi) and Jung Hoon Ahn (Dae-poong) are likeable and skilfully functional in the plot, but special mention must be made of the always superb Kim Hae-suk and, especially, Ha Jae Yeong as the missed in-laws, absolutely perfect in their respective parental afflictions...

Truly outstanding is the soundtrack not only as an ideal accompaniment for the story but, as in the case of the aforementioned Schubert ‘Serenade’, functional to the development of the plot itself.

‘Summer Scent’ is a roller coaster of emotions that has undoubtedly aged as well as good wine, I was pleasantly surprised to see it again and I think it can be considered an evergreen, decidedly more articulated and complex than one might expect, perhaps initially tricky due to the themes and dilemmas addressed, in addition to that ‘placid slowness’ mentioned above -which for me is a great virtue- and a cast of excellent level at the service of a very fascinating story...

Essential - like all segments of the ‘Endless Love’ cycle - for understanding and loving the Korean Wave phenomenon, ‘Summer Scent’ is a classic genre drama to watch, (re)watch and be loved.
8/10

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