Summary
The Art of Sarah has an initially effective structural gimmick and a committed lead performance, but it gets too bogged down by its own mysteries.
Class and luxury fashion are not new concepts in TV land, let alone in Netflix Korean dramas, so at first blush, The Art of Sarah feels a bit old-hat. A twisty mystery revolving around the enigmatic and eponymous Sarah Kim (Shin Hye-sun), it’s a thriller about beautiful faces being smashed in that spends most of its time discussing designer handbags and hanging around in swanky boutiques. But it’s a bit more nuanced and formally engaging than first appearances suggest, even if it ultimately gets a bit too convoluted for its own good and ends up running out of steam.
I think the key issue is that there isn’t really anything new to say about rich people and their toys; about what the designer fashion they covet says about them and their internal anxieties. Likewise, there isn’t a great deal of novelty in the idea of the “fake it until you make it” conman (or woman) whose identity is an onion-like series of increasingly ridiculous layers. With these two points in mind, it’s a wonder The Art of Sarah is as good as it is, because it revolves entirely around both.
A better title would have perhaps been Who is Sarah Kim?, which is the question that powers basically the entire narrative. And it’s a question the eight-part series takes seriously; so seriously, in fact, that each episode provides a new answer to the question, allowing the investigation by Detective Park Mu-gyeong (Lee Joon-hyuk) to prompt new conversations that consider Sarah from different angles. It’s a nifty structure, and for a while it works really well.
Eventually, though, there are simply too many versions of Sarah, too many aspects of the character considered from too many different points of view, to meaningfully keep track of or take seriously. This is no fault of Shin Hye-sun, whose performance is more versatile and nuanced than it’ll likely be given credit for, but instead a script by Chu Song-yeon that gets a bit carried away with the idea. After a while, Sarah ceases to even be a character, instead becoming a blank avatar that various other characters project the show’s underlying themes onto.
And, as mentioned, those themes aren’t especially new or engaging. It’s a weird predicament, but The Art of Sarah ends up being one of those mysteries that is really trying to be about something, but the thing it’s about is much less interesting than the mystery itself. Each turn begets a slightly new version of the same character designed to further blur the line between real and fake, reality and illusion, and after a while, I just got a bit fed up with it.
It might just be me, granted, but I don’t find the idea that people with money tie their identities to the things they buy to be especially revelatory, and that idea is presented multiple times in various configurations as though we’re supposed to be shocked by it each time. In getting bogged down by its themes, the show neglects a lot of essential characterisation for supporting players, specifically Detective Park, whose function in the narrative is supposed to be an objective, rational mirror to the allure of subjective tastes and identities. Instead, he’s mostly just a device to keep the plot moving, denied any real depth.
One must admit that there are the bones of a really good – and very nice-looking, though that’s par for the course at this point – six-episode limited series here. But the whole thing goes on a detrimentally long time, underserving both its characters and its initially effective structural gimmick by doing so. Perhaps some people just have too many secrets, and the idea of unpacking them is more trouble than it’s worth. That’s how I ended up feeling about Sarah Kim, whom I’m still none the wiser about even now.
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