Love Rain - episode 9
I am so in love with this, it's ridiculous!
It's swoony and funny and tremulously beautiful. It's pretty much my perfect drama.
I really love the relationship between In Ha and Yoon Hee, older yet still vibrant, everything complicated but pure feeling cutting through all of it.
You can tell Yoon Hee is denying her own happpiness due to duty and being a good person.
Ahhh, the scene where she looks at baby breath bouquet and it's quiet except for camera relentlessly on Lee Misuk's face, made me cry. YSH knows how to let a scene breathe, how to let the actors do their work.
She is slowly, hesitantly allowing In Ha (who is now hell-bent, determined to be with her - the years of living with the loss of her clarified everything for him) into her life.
And then there are Jun and Hana, who are young and stumbling and teasing and full of vibrant giddy chemistry and whom I can watch forever. All their scenes are so full of playfulness and hope and undeniable attraction.
I am not sure what I adore more - the scene where Jun ditches the oh-so-cool club outing at the hint Hana might like the young Doc, and comically is absurdly anxious at the outcomes of the silly drunk games Hana et al., are playing as some sort of his own obscure analysis of compatibility.
Or how he wordlessly takes her drink (which she has to drink as the loser of the game) and downs it for her.
Or the one where he discovers her drunk asleep in the chair and covers her with the blanket (solipsistic Jun, concerned!) and she drags him to sit with her and he is by turns amused, annoyed, or ridiculously pleased she might like him (and is honestly like a kid in that scene) but always there is the underpinning of mad attraction. When he kisses her (and then resorts to his patented hand gestures due to embarrassment) it is perfect because it is clear this is as much of a surprise to him as to her and us. He just cannot control his reactions around her at all.
Or the adorable morning after and how he lights up just being around her and teasing her. I love that she gives as good as she gets.
Or the scene at the fountain in the aftermath of his devastating talk with his mother. Hyejung is a horrible horrible woman. What kind of person tells her kid that it's his fault she was in a miserable marriage. No wonder Jun has so many issues about relationships - not only is he a child of divorce (that little admission he makes at the fountain to Hana that he used to wish his parents would get back together killed me. Especially because you know he's not opened up about that to anyone before. This is huge). No, In Ha, while I love him, was clearly a distant, lousy father. And Hyejung - no wonder Jun does not want to be in love - all he sees, sees daily, is the example of how love can hollow you out, drown your self-respect and decent qualities and turn you into pathetic, bitter shell.
But yes, the scene at the fountain, where he opens up and she, somehow, manages to cheer him up despite it all and the way she laughs and the way he looks at her when she's laughing. And the quick impromptu kiss and then his soft comment that now he's going to kiss her for real and she can turn away if she doesn't like it. But she doesn't, and he kisses her, and by kdrama standards this is pretty much x-rated, and it's one of the most romantic, gorgeous kisses ever, because it is so mood-driven, so hormonal, so unrestrained - because his snark works less and less on himself, because he's swept away utterly. And then the sprinklers go off, and she gets up soaked, and he grabs her and spins her and goes for a kiss again, even as they are getting soaked, because he simply cannot get enough. And her bag simply falls from her limp hand and our last image is of them kissing, oblivious. Oh God, I love this drama so.
Bring on ep 10!