Summary
When Life Gives You Tangerines tells a sweeping story of life and love in Episodes 1-4, but Volume 1 is clearly only the beginning.
Ever proving that there’s more than one way to skin a cat – or, in this case, air a K-Drama – Netflix elected to release When Life Gives You Tangerines, the expensively-produced IU-starring drama doubling as a love letter to Jeju Island, in four four-part volumes. Volume 1, comprising Episodes 1-4, lays out the show’s intentions clearly.
This is a story that spans decades, narrated through flashbacks but featuring multiple time jumps. It has that epic feel, too, a consequence of the structure itself, the show’s obvious fondness for its protagonist, Ae-sun, and a deep passion for the natural beauty and customs of Jeju Island. It’s a beautiful show and is shaping up, at least in this volume, to be quite a beautiful story.
I’m still not convinced about releasing four hour-long episodes at once though. It’s a less-than-ideal format for K-Drama, which tends to follow either the complete full season drop or twice-weekly model, both of which work well enough to question the logic of doing something else. When Life Gives You Tangerines isn’t a snappy thriller that keeps building to cliffhangers either. It’s quite a sedate, introspective character drama, and has a depth of emotion to it that I can’t help but feel would be best served in smaller doses, giving the audience time to sit with it a week between episodes.
But anyway. The premiere introduces us to Ae-sun, but as a 70-year-old in a retirement home looking back fondly on her life on Jeju Island in the ‘50s, stirred to nostalgia by a seaside stroll. As a 10-year-old she’s enthusiastic and devoted to her mother, one of the island’s haenyeo, or female divers, who spends her time harvesting sea life from the clear waters.
It isn’t an easy life. And it doesn’t get any easier as things go. Ae-sun’s mother dies, and her family is left in the grip of poverty. Her childhood love, Gwan-sik, helps to support her with offerings of stolen fish and grander gestures of standing up to his own family, come what may. Ae-sun’s dreams of being a poet fall by the wayside, as tends to happen whenever real life gets in the way of a more fanciful one.
This theme is reflected everywhere. In Episode 2 of When Life Gives You Tangerines, Ae-sun, now 18, goes to visit her paternal grandmother and is advised by an uncle to become a factory worker. The show’s underlying point is quite clear – how beauty and romance blossom in the cracks that sometimes form between slices of mundane reality – but delivered well enough to be compelling. And the romance is filtered through the same prism of necessity. Ae-sun compels Gwan-sik to go against his family and marry her, so they elope to Busan but find themselves scammed and forced to return home, shepherded by Gwan-sik’s mother.
Like Ae-sun’s life in general, her relationship with Gwan-sik is a struggle. There are many hurdles to overcome, with Episode 3 really focusing on this era, but love finds a way. Marriage eventually comes, and a daughter, Geum-myeong, follows. When Life Gives You Tangerines is good at depicting the radical change of perspective a child provides. That desire to give your child the best you can leads to a willingness to do dangerous work or put up with less-than-ideal circumstances; to make sacrifices in your own life because it’s now less important than the innocent life you’re ultimately responsible for.
The irony is that Geum-myeong seems to grow up on the back of these sacrifices with the opposite point of view; that her own dreams and aspirations aren’t worth putting aside to please others, let alone a boyfriend. It’s a poignant, ironic turnaround, the idea that one’s reward for sacrifice is someone being blessed to never have cause to understand it.
Having covered so much ground already, it’s interesting to wonder where When Life Gives You Tangerines might go in its second batch of episodes.
