Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang is still delightful

Since I’m going to be talking about Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang in this post, I wanted to put up this song from the soundtrack. This show has a lot of really good songs, and I’ve got a bunch of them on my ipod, but this one is my favorite.

Mi Ahn Hae Ya Ha Neun Guh Ni - As-One (에즈원)

Looking back, I've watched a rather obscene amount of kdramas in the past year or two. (For the uninitiated, those are South Korea television series). It helps that at about 16-24 episodes each they're mostly much shorter than their multi-seasonal American counterparts. Yet until recently I never went back and re-watched a kdrama in its entirety from start to finish. To be fair, I did re-watch certain parts of Coffee Prince a lot, but I never went through all the episodes consecutively for a second time. But just this past week I had the sudden desire to revisit a series I initially watched about a year ago, and I ended up re-watching every single episode, and falling in love with it all over again. So I decided to write a nice, happy post about how much I adore “Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang”.

The 2005 series Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang (or Sassy Girl Choon-Hyang) draws on a famous traditional Korean love story, the Legend of Choon-Hyang, and reinterprets it in a modern setting. This is not an original device, but it’s one that’s done extremely well in this case. For anyone who’s ever wondered whether or not it’s possible to mix melodrama of Romeo-and-Juliet proportions with modern, trendy romantic comedy, well, the answer is DGCH. This series manages all that and more. Plus, the two leads are made of awesome.

Han Chae-Young, who just might be the prettiest woman to walk the face of the earth, plays Sung Choon-Hyang with a delightful sense of sass and spunk. But the real standout here is Jae Hee, who plays Lee Mong-Ryong. He pulls some of the best facial expressions you’ll ever see, and he manages to hit the comedic notes in such an endearing way as to make you totally forgive him and even love him for his goofiness. But in addition to that, during the more dramatic/emotional moments this guy can emote like no other. He really delivers both excellent comedy and excellent intensity in this drama, whereas a lot of other drama dudes’ acting tends to seem more stiff and forced to me. Add to all this his great chemistry with Han Chae-Young and you’ve got one pretty irresistible package.

Another thing I really like about this drama was the way it handles the passing of time. The story follows the characters from high school, through college (well, some of them go to college), and into early adulthood. This all somehow happens very naturally and smoothly over the course of seventeen 65 minute episodes. One really gets a sense of Choon-Hyang’s and Mong-Ryong’s growth, and the growth of their relationships, while they still remain true to the characters we originally fell in love with in episode one. Whereas many other dramas tend inevitably to slow down or drag after the initial premise is established, DGCH keeps the plot moving and pulls you along with it for an emotional roller-coaster ride.

Another thing that was cool about this drama was that at the end of the episodes there would usually be short parodies of the popular folk legend on which it’s based, with the actors dressed in traditional garb acting out spoofs of the Choon-Hyang story on sets imitating those of period dramas. It’s actually very clever how these short sketches sometimes reflected what was going on in the drama itself, and sometimes merely spoofed particular elements of the traditional version of the story.

All this being said, I’m not entirely blind to the drama’s faults. But although DGCH does have a lot of the stereotypical kdrama clichés (including but not limited to the ever ubiquitous love square), it somehow manages to use them in such a way as to make me forget that they’re clichéd. And although this drama did have a ridiculous amount of crazy and unrealistic u-turns on the part of the male drivers, I take comfort in the fact that there wasn’t a single back-hug in the entire thing! (I think.)

So in conclusion, anybody remotely interested in kdramas should check out DGCH because it’s one of the best in my opinion. See this fan-made video for a sense of the delightfully humorous elements, and this one for an idea of the more dramatic, emotional components.