“I want to live singing
those kinds of songs
to the people I love”
Lim Sooho
A gentle breeze brushes his face and Sooho opens his eyes.
The wind caresses him.
He looks for her, turns his head and finds her there, close to him.
The anxiety that makes his heart clench whenever Youngro is not by his side subsides.
Their gazes meet and Sooho gets lost in her eyes.
He could spend his life getting lost in those eyes.
Every time he looks at Youngro, he remembers the moment her hands had awkwardly grasped his and they first exchanged glances. The control he had always had over his emotions crumbled to dust along with the tower of matches falling on the table.
He had lived so many lives before that day.
In so many different places, met so many people he couldn’t remember their faces, but he did not know what butterflies in the stomach were up till then, Sooho.
He had never experienced that weird feeling of mixed astonishment and pleasure.
He had never felt so helpless.
Meeting Youngro had felt like the breeze coming through that window.
It caused him to open his eyes and unveil a truth he had not thought possible.
That girl with the big eyes, small nose and soft lips that reminded him of the bunnies he used to play with as a child. She had, by touching him, led him on a journey of self-discovery.
Of a self who he did not know existed but desperately strived to be.
There, where he grew up, he was taught that the reasons why life is worth living are the same it’s worth dying for.
Sooho firmly believes this and has always lived by that credo.
Family, honour, loyalty, driven by an unmatched sense of morality.
Meeting Youngro reminded him, however, that the key to his life is love.
It has always been love, even if he has not always been fully aware of it.
That’s what she asks him in the attic, Youngro, while making coffee.
She asks him how he ended up living that life he’s living, and he cannot answer.
He cannot come to terms with the fact that the desire to save Soohui, that gesture of love towards his sister, led him to give up his choices.
In front of Youngro, he unravels.
He surrenders to the dream of being happy.
To the hope that love will make one happy.
And he kisses her.
Before Youngro, love had only brought him pain.
Love and pain for his father’s death.
Love and pain for the mother’s rejection.
The love for Soohui and the pain of living the life Lim Jirok had written for him.
Thanks to Youngro, it is finally clear to him what it means that what you want to live for is what you would die for.
Youngro awakens in him wishes and hopes that he had forgotten having inside.
He sees himself as a child, sitting around the bonfire, dreaming of living the life narrated in those songs his father sang.
When he discovers that life exists, it is too late to live it.
Still, that discovery is a katharsis and frees him from regrets. Loving Youngro gives meaning to everything. He falls for her and finds his purpose in loving her and spending his life by her side.
If he cannot live with her, she is worth dying for. Sooho feels the pain of the events that “turned him into a person who cannot be with her'” very deeply but still wants his love for Youngro to be the reason behind his choices. Youngro is his choice, and Sooho cannot accept giving her up. He cannot imagine feeling alive without her.
“If I were a normal guy, I would have spent all of my time with you.”
He records it on tape, in the dormitory, with the foreboding of not having a future with Youngro and not wanting one without. In the end, he is able to do just that: to spend every minute he has left with her and make it count.
He is not the master of his time, far from it.
But he can decide its intensity.
Despite all circumstances, despite fate, Sooho turns his life, from the moment he returns and takes her hostage, into an act of love.
He had already gifted her the dove, which he valued more than his own life, because, when leaving her, he wanted to give her his whole self.
In the days of the kidnapping, thanks to his feelings for her, Sooho is able to gain awareness of the fact he wasn’t living the life he wanted, not until he met her.
Youngro makes him the person he wants to be, and he discovers he is human in a way he hadn’t thought possible.
He wants to hug her, hold her, make her laugh and make her happy. He wishes to surrender to himself, but he can’t. His every glance is a “what if…”.
He is not allowed to show ordinary gestures of love.
Every moment he spends in the dormitory there is something he would like to do but does not do, would like to tell but does not tell.
He says goodbye so many times, and every time it is like dying inside, so he feels all the time given to him as a gift.
The knowledge that she loves him too is the only happiness he is granted.
And that’s enough.
And it makes him willing to give up his life for her.
Youngro saved him, giving him hope for a better meaning, a beautiful one.
He tells her that if the two of them had been ordinary people, he would have wanted to live his life singing songs to the people he loved.
This is what he does, first in the days of the kidnapping, then by dying in the attic.
He saves her as well, in his own way, and gives her something to hold on to.
Sooho’s life is the love song he sings for Youngro.
Pinching the strings of the guitar, he looks up.
This time he does not have to look for her, she is there.
Sitting at the table where they met, she looks at him and smiles.
She smiles.
He sings words of love.
Her eyes gleam.
It was his dream.
She made it possible.
Their eternity.
Talking about Snowdrop without devoting a special room to Lim Sooho wouldn’t be possible, because Sooho is the core of Snowdrop, his heart the protagonist of this poignant journey.
However, Snowdrop is undoubtedly a choral series, Sooho just gives “La” to what happens in the path of each character.
In the claustrophobic days of the kidnapping, everyone inside the dormitory comes to terms with the choices they made, regrets and dreams, even more than with danger and drama.
And at the end of those painful days, every character emerges from that dormitory having found their true selves, just like Sooho.
Snowdrop is an unconventional drama, everything related is so peculiar that the story is impossible to overlook and unthinkable to forget.
Not only because it is a love story lived in secret, told with delicate nuances of the script and the expressive intensity of the actors, enough to make it an imperishable ode to Love with a capital L that deserved the favours of literature and poetry over the centuries.
It is also a truly unique story of courage, from genesis to airing and beyond.
It has been thought out and wanted for years, and when it evolved from paper to project, nothing was simple, obvious nor ordinary.
Maybe this is the reason it ended up being one of the most loved series.
Because you can feel the passion, tenacity, and courage, put into its realisation.
Cast & crew must have experienced a siege-like reality, just like their characters in the dormitory, entrenched behind the will to make it through the storm they lived when filming.
Great, absolute credit for the amazing success of the project undoubtedly goes to the director, Jo Hyun Tak.
No hesitation, no second thought in telling a story that deserved to be told.
The strength of a true leader, hidden behind smiles and jokes, to make the atmosphere the most comfortable despite the issues and pressures..
Because you need to be fearless and have boundless trust in the actors you work with to entrust so much of the narrative to close-ups.
Only the greatest. Rarely in cinema, let alone in the series.
Opposite of an entertainment based on easy attractions and not always attuned to narrative and introspection, Jo Hyun Tak turns strongly against the tide and chooses to let us into the characters’ minds by letting the actors’ showcase their full expressiveness in front of the audience.
Snowdrop’s intensity lies pretty much in this, in its being filled with close-ups to introduce us to the narrow and somewhat intimate dormitory’s atmosphere.
Every close-up gives the audience a sense of the subtlest emotional perceptions of the characters.
The actors are responsible with every muscle of their face and nuance of their expressions of telling us the fragile interactions between the characters, in all the shades of their emotionality, palpable thanks to the highliting of every single ripple.
As a director, you must have a lot of courage to make such a prevailing use of close-ups.
So much courage and the luck to be able to count on a cast beyond comparison, in its ensemble and as individuality.
Jan SeungJo, Yoon SeAh, Yoo InNa, Kim MinGue, Jung Eugene, Jang InSub, Kim HyeYoon, Kim JongSoo, Heo JunHo, Park SungWoong, Lee HwaRyong, Jung YiSeo, Choi HeeJin, Jung SinHye, the sweet Kim Misoo, and all the others, performed what in another series and another context would have earned nominations, awards and recognition.
Not in Snowdrop, unfortunately, because all the courage shown by Jo HyunTak and the JTBC did not match an ounce of it in the shoes of sponsors and critics.
The series with the highest Twitter engagement of 2022, globally speaking, will enter 2023 with the knowledge that the recognition has not rolled in, neither will roll in.
As if awards counted, as if they were the measure of the value of art.
Art cannot be judged, only loved.
Love and courage count, and Snowdrop is full of them.
When I talked about Jo HyunTak’s brave choices in filming Snowdrop I deliberately skipped the bravest one, to give it the attention it deserves.
As the female lead in his drama Jo HyunTak casted Kim Jisoo.
The reasons why choosing Jisoo as the protagonist sounded risky and illogical were many, and they all seemed well-founded.
But they do not count, do not matter anymore.
Because by challenging clichés and prejudices and trusting his instincts, Jo HyunTak has given us the Youngro we all love and will carry in our hearts forever.
Youngro was not an easy character to play, far from it.
She enters the world of Snowdrop being yet almost a child, a naive dreamer, and ends up on the floor in that attic like a woman so aware of the meaning of life that she promises to keep on living to the man she loves and who is dying, showing a sign of courage lacking in literary characters like Juliet.
Courage, again, is the protagonist of Snowdrop’s beauty.
Because if the director showed courage in choosing her, Jisoo showed just as much in accepting the role.
To debut as a protagonist in the role of such a complex character required unique, specific, in a way, unusual skills.
Jisoo understood this and put in what an inexperienced person could put in: the humbleness of knowing that she was not a master of acting techniques or experiences like others.
Once she has put her humbleness at the disposal of the story, the result will have surprised the mean-minded, because her Youngro is the best Youngro the story could have had.
The Youngro that Snowdrop deserved.
Without claiming to build her character’s emotions, Jisoo gave Youngro her own.
She lived with her every moment and let expressiveness spring from the defences let down, from an invaluable emotional vulnerability.
The journey of growth that Youngro makes throughout the story is Jisoo’s journey.
With the freshness only a debutante could give to the character, she gave us a performance worthy of all praise and all love.
Of course, like any actor, she did not make the journey alone.
There was the director.
There were the other cast members.
There was Jung HaeIn.
Jung HaeIn.
Blessed be the tenacity Jo HyunTak demonstrated by wanting him as Lim Sooho.
Blessed his insistence and that famous case of beer because the moment Jung Haein embraced Snowdrop, he allowed a masterpiece to come to light.
A wonderful human being like Lim Sooho comes to life, almost like Michelangelo’s Prigioni, who shed their formless rock because they want to live.
Jung HaeIn created Lim Sooho with his bare hands from ice, a chisel from marble, and the colours of the soul on a blank canvas.
In the most delicate moment of his career, when he was marking the turning point he had so patiently built, – which the world was praising with D.P., and which he wanted to continue with titles as purposeful as Connect and Veteran – to accept the role in Snowdrop meant questioning the image the establishment had of him at the time, by exposing himself to the media storm and the petty retaliation that would have ensued.
Besides, he never lacked courage, at every step of his outstanding career.
Retrace the footprints of Jung HaeIn’s journey and you will see a consistency and coherence that is truly rare in today’s cinema and entertainment.
Never was a character of his taken for granted.
Never has he made banal choices.
Never has he backed away from challenging the canons of a society that can and must change.
He is the one behind his characters, those choices, those challenges.
Jung HaeIn is behind Lim Sooho.
He is In Lim Sooho, around Lim Sooho.
The reason for so much love toward the character he was playing can only be told by him, the actor.
What is certain is that nothing about how Jung Haein became Sohoo was imaginable or predictable.
He took the soul of this North Korean boy who was too young to be so broken, too good to not deserve a chance, and that soul he encapsulated in his heart.
With every beat of his heart he made him live and gave him a stage and a voice to tell a story that could not remain untold.
The artistic moment Jung HaeIn creates by performing Sohoo belongs to those masterpieces that escape all evaluation because they are too far above the ordinary canons of judgement.
Jung HaeIn does not play Sooho.
Jung Haein is Sooho.
Heart to heart, like a medium accepting to be entered by a wandering spirit, Jung Haein gave himself to Sooho.
He gave every part of himself to him, every cell of his body, every muscle, tendon, look, smile and tear, every chord of his soul.
He expressed his feelings and emotions with imperceptible nuances of poignant intensity.
He narrated Sooho’s thoughts and feelings with the contraction of a jaw, an arm muscle, or from the back. From the back, motionless.
No one before, only him, always.
Sooho passes through the Snowdrop days like an icy meteor entering the atmosphere and from ice directly becoming fire, to burn with a very short and very intense life until it is extinguished.
His story is so desperately sad as to be unacceptable.
None of us left that attic with comfort or hope, quite the opposite.
Sooho’s death is so bloody unfair, heart-wrenching, filled with anger and despair.
It is of poor worth knowing that a slightly different direction at one fork in the road could have been enough to save him, with an arc almost more consistent than the succession of events leading to his death.
We have travelled the whole journey by his side enough to know why he dies, there, in that attic. We cry with Youngro, and we would like to hold him, to keep him there.
But he dies.
With his eyes open, he never stops looking at Youngro, because he is dying and Youngro represents his own forever.
He looks at her in those last moments to always have her by his side, she will be all he remembers.
Though, he will not go away either.
He will not disappear.
The deepest mark of Snowdrop’s worth as a story and Sohoo as a character lies in Jung HaeIn’s final speech at the end of filming.
He says it between tears that flow as uncontrollably as Sooho’s feelings, leaving it there in a broken voice… Sooho will never be forgotten.
By saying that, magically, he turns him immortal.
Every time a tear is shed, or an emotion felt in his name, Sooho’s story will have made sense, and he will be alive in the hearts of those who remember him.
In the heart of Youngro.
Every day.
Until the end of time.
Because that is the power of Snowdrop
The power of love.
Love makes you immortal.
This is the WordPress blog link to see it with the photos.
If you love it an ounce of how much I love Snowdrop and Sooho, I'll be happy.
with love and gentle hugs,
Federica
응원 횟수 0