The original TVING drama "LTNS" starring Lee Su and Ahn Jae-hong is co-written and directed by Im Dae-hyung ("To Yoon-hee") and Jeon Go-woon ("Little Princess"), which tells the story of a young couple who live a sexless marriage due to a difficult life, blackmailing people who are unfaithful to their partners in order to make money, and in the process confronting their broken relationship.
Large-scale topics, light comedy tone, and the protagonist's good mental state······ As soon as this short drama with only 6 episodes was broadcast, it received unimaginable resonance and a high reputation of 8.6 on Douban. It is another dark horse of TVING after "Death is Coming"!
But when you actually watch the drama, you will find that there is a bit of a gap with the marketing gimmicks of "19 bans" and "cool dramas".
The core of "LTNS" is actually full of helplessness and bitterness, through the "classic" and vulgar stories, as well as the protagonist's nominal marital relationship, it stabs the ills of East Asian reality and the precarious emotional state of modern people.
The director's camera scheduling is also very light, smooth and ingenious, with some nonsensical background music, which controls the rhythm of the story with comedic effect and tension to a certain extent.
For example, the beginning of the paragraph uses the button as a transition to 7 years later, which is not only the effect of the natural transition time, but also the image of the button is an interesting little metaphor here~
Pulling buttons and sewing buttons can be seen as a control group - the passion of 7 years ago disappeared in a blink of an eye, and turned into the trivialities of ordinary life.
Especially now, 7 years later, the male protagonist has no desire and no desire, covering a thin blanket while watching TV while sewing buttons, and the impatience at the beginning is like two people.
To add insult to injury, the background news is playing on housing prices that are as dismal as their relationship······ As soon as I bought it, the house price fell wildly, and I lost more than 100 million won directly.
At the beginning, the heavy and cruel reality is spread out, and it is self-evident why the male and female protagonists have become sexless marriages and have no children. It's so hard to live a good day······
Isn't that the saying goes? When the environment is harsh and unfit to survive, animals will reproduce less.
It's not just the house price.,Bad luck always seems to find people who are used to being unlucky.,The taxi that the male protagonist Samuel relied on for a living was scrapped.。
I wanted to borrow money from a friend who married a rich wife, but I accidentally learned that the other party was having an affair, and the object of the affair was my sister who was still splitting her legs, and the love troubles of the rich were really ridiculous~
The friend was afraid that the couple would tell his wife about his affair, so he was "knocked" a huge sum of money at the door, and by mistake, Samuel and Youzhen tasted the sweetness of crime for the first time, and it turned out that people in an extortion and extortion relationship could actually make money······
They bought a new taxi and started a "new career" in their lives, and the first couple they chose to blackmail was a social animal couple who would cheat on dinner during their 20-minute lunch break.
I have to run to buy lunch, and I'm really diligent... Even let the woman run errands to buy it, and the man sat in the car and enjoyed it.
This detail lightly shows the asymmetry of the two in this relationship. The woman has put in more true feelings and effort, this man has children at home, his wife is pregnant with a second child, he will only provide emotional value with sweet words, and he doesn't really want to give anything.
It's not fair. But does reciprocity and fairness really exist in emotional relationships? If we pursue fairness in relationships, should men who are born with more social resources and eyes consciously give more, or just... Concession?
Samuel, as a bystander, felt pitiful for the woman, and Yuzhen's lines hit the nail on the head-
"There is no unsympathetic woman in the Republic of Korea. ”
"Youzhen has also dated a scumbag?"
"Of course, how could I have survived in a country full of scum. ”
Not only do women have to face domineering, selfish, and bad men in the social status and marriage market, but banks also have to do their best to make money from women, and under the banner of women-only discounts, people can borrow more and repay high interest.
If you look at the situation of women in episodes 3 and 4 of the story, this world really wants women to squeeze no bones left······
A very ingenious point in this story is that the screenwriter designed a fetish for this two-faced, hypocritical and abusive scumbag who can only orgasm when he is severely abused, and the irony is full.
In the end, the man paid half of the amount in order to "protect the family", because his love was only worth 7 million won (about 37,520 yuan), and the conclusion was - a scheming poor man!
At the end of this episode, Samuel went to his mailbox again and put a yellow envelope, maybe because the amount given was not enough, so this time he exposed the cheating PPT (with iPad) to his family?
The story of this pair of men and women is not only a condensation of reality, we can also see some storytelling methods, especially Korean dramas are very good at using funny, comedy, and irony to deal with offensive \ disgusting characters or bridges, which have more dramatic effects. Just like the funny image of the second male in the recent hit drama "Please Marry My Husband" and his clumsy cheating.
Episodes 3 and 4 cut into a more unique perspective, the lust of the elderly and the story of homosexuals have their own heartaches, and Samuel and Tomojin begin to pay the price of blood on the way to crime.
Although the grandmother in episode 3 gave birth to two sons, she never kissed in her life, and she felt that she was finally loved when she met Jiang Baihu, but in fact, it is obvious that she is also a pleasing and serving posture rather than a enjoyer in unruly love, and this kind of bone inertia makes people feel a little bitter.
But in the face of blackmail, this grandmother was not shaken at all, neither gave money, but also told the male and female protagonists to "don't hinder her". If the people who actively or passively choose to pay in the 4 episodes are the ones who have families, that is, those who have more people and are afraid of losing their existing lives.
But grandma also has a family, and I think the direct reason for paying is not the amount of money but the "value", even if she has a family, in her family, she is also the most insignificant person, there is no equivalent value that can be lost, such as money, love, family, status, and dignity.
Compared with the banter and irony of the previous episodes of the story, the gays in episode 4 have more warmth, which may have something to do with the fact that director Ren Dajiong is the director of the movie "To Yunxi", the pictures of hugging and kissing in the church are a little beautiful, especially in the location of the church, there is a kind of love that breaks the taboo of the world, tent shadow sex, and the confession of "don't care about those and come back soon", which is very easy (more romantic than shooting the male and female protagonists~)
Episodes 3 and 4 emphasize women's desires more, which is also relatively rare in film and television. Thinking of a book shared by a friend – "'Sex' is often perceived as dirty and filthy, especially women's sexuality, which is often associated with shame, but by telling the story, shame can be sublimated into courage······" (Zeng Yanjing, "I don't want to live correctly, I just want to live like myself")
Finally, I would like to leave a little space for the two main characters of Samuel and Tomoma, whose problems are certainly not just asexual, but asexual is just a phenomenon, or the "result" of a relationship.
Their relationship is undermined by real-life pressures such as buying a house and paying off a loan, and strangely reconnected by the crime of extortion.
Personally, I feel that the metaphor buried deep in "LTNS" is very interesting, and the topic of sex is not only the entry point, but also related to the main crime.
Just like the scumbag who only orgasms after being scolded in the second episode is a portrayal of his nature, Samuel and Yujin will also re-experience the pleasure of similar sex in the crime committed by their accomplices.
Perhaps there are some subtle commonalities between the two themselves. Of course, there is a considerable difference between the two, a crime is a crime, and there is an unbearable price to pay. The alternating beatings and bleeding were small, and Samuel almost died.
Look at it this way they are really trying, not only "trying" in relationships, but also "trying" in crime······ In order to take indecent evidence, swimming across the sea in the middle of the night, riding a bicycle to escape, only to be hit by a car and fly to a concussion, it is difficult to find the perpetrators who work harder than them, right?
But sometimes, the more you need to "work hard" to do something, the easier it is to be overstretched and reveal its sad undertone, and so is crime, and so is relationship.
The "efforts" of the two to repair the relationship have created a lot of comedic effects in the plot, although they did not focus on depicting their contradictions, but they can already see the clues from two or three lines of lines, from the perspective of praising each other's advantages, and from the way they deal with each other's quarrels······ Is such an "effort" really right?
How will the relationship between the two who have experienced a life-and-death crisis develop?Who is the woman Samuel called to meet at the end of episode 4?What is the foreshadowing of the blood stains on the mineral water that he ordered too much?Such an attractive and good-looking drama, there are only the last 2 episodes left······