Love From Zero to One (2022)

A Snack for a Rainy Day

In 2015, a Korean drama Hyde, Jekyll and Me received a great deal of attention for its quirky premise. At the time I was a fan of the actor who played the male lead, Hyun Bin and thought the premise intriguing -- a man suffering from dissociative personality disorder and both personalities competing for the female lead. The result was a mixed bag. Hyun Bin was great in the dual role but the script was weak (the world building was half-hearted) and aspects of it ridiculous. I can well imagine too that it’s a challenge to find a satisfying resolution to a love triangle that involves two people sharing the same body when the female lead shows a distinct preference for the secondary identity over the core one.

Several years later, someone else has taken another stab at the subject matter and the result is also a mixed bag. Again it’s mainly the script although performances vary across the board. Here the female lead Jing Zhixia (Joey Chua) meets the alternate personality Lin first and it's love at first sight. Some time later the two indulge in a steamy one night stand and the core identity Fu Zeyi (Xiao Kaizhong) wakes up the next morning wondering what his alter had gotten them both into and then takes off without so much as a by your leave. The poor girl is left ruminating for a year about the charming musician that swept her off her feet then left her high and dry.

While Joey Chua has a knack for the comedic, her character Jing Zhixia, though badly used by the two personalities is not exactly well written. This is the definition of a trashy rom com but even so how a woman of her limited ability (or limited interest in the business) can be allowed to be part of the management of a 5-star hotel boggles the mind. I'm not sure I'd even trust her with a small-scale B and B. Certainly it’s understandable that the show doesn’t want her to be the stereotypical Cinderella figure in a grumpy, arrogant CEO drama. Instead she’s a materialistic spoilt rich girl who decides to sell off a portion of her shares in the family business so that she can go gallivanting. This of course plays into the much more capable hands of Fu Zeyi who wants the land that the hotel is presently sitting on.

As soon as he gains management rights to the hotel, the two lock horns in true rom com fashion. Suddenly she’s all about family loyalty and her father's legacy. On the one hand she’s sure he’s the guy who loved her and left her a year earlier, on the other hand, he vehemently denies it knowing full well that his alter has been up to some serious hanky-panky in his absence. Besides, dissociative identity disorder is a shocking secret borne out of a childhood trauma that he'd rather not share with the world. Aside from the fledgling romance, there's also the succession issue to consider.

Fu Zeyi, as one might expect, is a right royal jerk at the start. It is hard to root for him at first because he is trying hard to keep Zhixia at bay while making sure his secret is safe. Soon, however, he finds himself inconveniently attracted to her and starts acting territorial, doing all kinds of odd things that wasn’t previously in his programming. Even his rigid and cantankerous father notices the make over. Zhixia is obviously confused by what she sees as capriciousness and more so when Fu Zeyi and Lin make her the trophy while they vie aggressively for her affections.

Xiao Kaizhong who plays both isn’t bad in the role. It's at the very least much better than what I had expected. He certainly has a roaring good time with the mayhem of the Yi-Lin dialectic without overdoing anything. He and Joey Chua have good chemistry but they are definitely underserved by the script.

Despite the obvious budgetary limitations imposed (The fabulously wealthy Fu Zheyi has only a handful of suits to strut around in), the one thing that this show does better than its Korean predecessor is to show how Zhixia gradually cottons on to the deception which sends her running. at first. Gradually, however, she works out that the arrogant Fu Zheyi is the one that she loves not because he is her ideal but because he tries to push himself beyond his limits for her sake. Fortunately for us, she has something of a growth arc and demonstrates the capacity to be much more than what she first presents herself to be.

The relationship is fraught with all kinds of moral and ethical issues in part because of the deception and in part due to the fact that the mental health issue is more of a benign plot device for the push and pull rather than a genuinely serious obstacle to two people’s happily-ever-after.

Even rom coms need villains apparently. Although Fu Zeyi was bordering on being one in the beginning as he plots to acquire the hotel, that title is reserved for someone else — someone close to him who’s out for blood but the motivation for his entire revenge scheme makes no sense except that he’s evidently gone loopy. The 20-year wait to exact vengeance makes no sense either.

What saves this drama for me is the finale. It wraps things up as well as a half-hour 18 episode web drama might be expected to. There's no lack of the nonsensical in it but at least there's resolution for Fu Zeyi and Lin. More importantly, for me at least, there's an acknowledgment that Fu Zeyi is the core personality and Lin was always just an identity that emerged to protect him. He was a by-product of a mental health dysfunction. It's a crucial piece of the romance that had to be addressed. Lin was always the fantasy never the reality -- the delusion that Zhixia was in search of and Zeyi wanted to be. The reality as represented by Fu Zeyi is about a man riddled with deep-seated guilt at what happened in the past and who was always seeking his father's approval while weighed down by all kinds of emotional baggage that he never allowed himself to express. Falling in love... it can be said... broke the shackles.

The finale is surprisingly fitting and therefore makes the entire journey worth sitting through. There's a lot that doesn't make sense and it does fall along fairly predictable lines but at least there's enough fan servicing to snack on to keep one coming back for more.

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