Paper Moon: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by missvictrix

Haunting, introspective, and a little bit desperate — that’s how I would describe the story of Paper Moon as we see it in its premiere. It also describes our heroine. Though everything seems quiet from the outside, there’s an internal tsunami that’s gaining strength.

Editor’s note: This is an opening review only.
 
EPISODE 1

As Episode 1 opens, we meet a middle-aged woman who’s in a horrible marriage to a certifiably awful husband. She feels trapped in her life at home, and yearns for something more. If this premise sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same basic setup as another current drama, Doctor Cha. Of course, the two dramas couldn’t be more different — one taking the road of comedy and hijinks, and the other (our drama at hand) taking a decidedly dramatic approach of the Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary vein. Ah, it makes me fall in love with storytelling all over again — to think that the same exact premise could create two totally different dramas (and countless others as well).

Our heroine in Paper Moon is YOO YI-HWA (Kim Seo-hyung), but we meet her sometime in the future — or so we guess — because it feels like the climax of the story. She’s on the run in Thailand and her Korean won catch the attention of some suspicious looking guys. As she runs desperately through the rain in her beautiful dress, the scene dissolves into Yi-hwa’s life in Seoul, where she’s running, but for exercise around her ritzy neighborhood.

Her life looks perfect and comfortable, but it’s also slowly killing her soul. We see it as we follow Yi-hwa throughout her day: there’s an empty nursery in her house, and an even bigger emptiness in her eyes. Then her husband (Gong Jung-hwan) gets home from work and wants nothing to do with her. He all but tells her not to talk to him in the morning after serving him his breakfast, and at one point also tells her to “do her makeup” before they attend a luncheon so that she doesn’t look like an ajumma.

If you couldn’t tell from those two examples, her husband is patronizing and truly awful. It’s strong and even a bit cliché, but also necessary for the story, because we need to root for Yi-hwa’s desperate grasp at freedom, and she can’t be desperate if she’s not first miserable. But also, it’s a pretty standard setup for a drama that’s about to feature a love affair — i.e., trying to justify infidelity in the world of the story via a terrible spouse that doesn’t value you at all, compared to a new lover who delights just to see you from across the street.

We learn a few important things about Yi-hwa from her close friends and some interactions that happen early on. She used to be a well-esteemed HR manager who was wonderful at her job. Presumably, she quit to marry and start a family, but we get shades of how that’s been going, when her husband can’t be bothered to show up for his role in the ongoing fertility treatment she’s been having. He later goes so far as to mock children in general, and is so inhumane that you wonder why she married him in the first place.

Yi-hwa, we quickly learn, is the exact opposite of her husband. She’s elegant and kind-hearted. She pays for the groceries of a confused older woman she meets in the grocery store; she’s the stable one compared to the dramatic lives of her friends; she’s also known for her integrity. (One of her friends even jokes that she’s probably never even gone through a red light.)

After she receives a business card from an acquaintance, Yi-hwa decides she should go back to work, and tries to convince her husband. Again, he’s vile, and says he’ll give her more allowance if she wants money (omg I really hate him). She tries to explain that she wants a place to be during the day so that she looks forward to coming home in the evening (this was some incredibly touching dialogue), but of course that’s lost on the souless man she lives with. But in the end — and without any narrative delay — Yi-hwa is soon working in a saving bank in a tidy little uniform.

As we see her at work, we again realize that she’s kind, patient, and goes out of her way to help their clients — from the homeless man whom she conveniently leaves mix coffee for, to the young guy who’s denied a loan and then stuck in the rain without an umbrella. And oh, sweet trope reversal! The rain starts to fall, and this young man is covered by someone else’s umbrella. The camera slowly pans and it’s Yi-hwa who has come outside and is holding it over him.

We have seem him briefly before — and so has our heroine — he’s YOON MIN-JAE (Lee Shi-woo). When we first meet him it’s in the middle of a rough-looking knife fight. But don’t worry, he’s just acting, and we’re on the set of his student film. All the girls are into him, but he seems to be a bit different than the rest — he sits off to the side sketching while all the others hang out and eat.

Like any good hero he’s hounded by debt and can’t scrape together enough money to treat the cut on his own neck, nevermind pay the hospital bill of one of his friends when he’s injured on Min-jae’s set.

Min-jae goes to his grandfather to ask for money, and that’s when he first crosses paths with Yi-hwa. She’s there on business for the bank, which has her on the VIP team paying visits to extremely wealthy customers that need special handling. There are a few of them she visits regularly, but Min-jae’s grandfather takes the lead. He’s filthy, filthy rich, and totally awful. Come to think of it, there are very few men in this story with any redeeming qualities — and perhaps that’s why Min-jae stands out as the lotus flower in the mud.

During this interaction, Yi-hwa not only sees Min-jae’s desperation for money, but also his dignity — he refuses to clean up the spit his grandfather has just spat near him as payment for accepting money from him. And, to paint the picture of our heroine even more clearly, she’s the one that kneels to clean the spit. She also does a favor for Grandpa, and takes his secret (borrowed name account) bank books when he’s about to get investigated.

But here is where things start to get a bit more intriguing. Granted, there’s already a tone of desperation and longing in this whole thing — Yi-hwa spends so much time gazing out at the moon as if it’s her only confidant — but then the plot starts to turn. We see Yi-hwa start to crack a bit. Is it because her husband cleaned out the nursery she’d so lovingly prepared? Is it because she’s back in the world and seeing how dreadful it can be? Is it because she’s stuck in her life and desperate to shake things up?

First, she “borrows” money from the cash bag of a client while she’s out shopping for expensive cosmetics. She replaces the money with her own right away, but that little jolt of a thrill stays with her.

Meanwhile, Yi-hwa keeps running into Min-jae, and she winds up with his resume after wrecking his (borrowed) suit while he’s coming from a job interview. She calls him to meet up and reimburse him for the cost of the suit, and rather than him taking the envelope and leaving, the two sit and chat. Yi-hwa asks if she wants to have cake with him, and pulls out a cake box that his grandfather gave her for helping him hide his bank books. But when she opens the box, there’s no cake inside… it’s a red lace bra! Yi-hwa gasps (as do I) and hides it, and then we jump ahead a few scenes.

After crossing the line once, a second time is less difficult. We see Yi-hwa withdraw money from one of Grandpa’s secret accounts, reasoning to herself that, “I’ll just move a little of the money to another account. That filthy old man doesn’t even know how much money he has but he won’t give some to his grandson who’s desperate for money.” And with that, the embezzlement is off to a richly complex start.

It’s such a interesting first episode, mostly because of how closely we track with our heroine. While we don’t see inside her motivations entirely, Kim Seo-hyung’s performance is magnetic and helps us feel every bit of our heroine’s urge to escape her life, and to feel a jolt, a thrill — anything. While I’d argue that some of the tension of her downward spiral is lost by the opening sequence, watching this whole thing unfold is still going to be compelling.

There’s also some interconnectedness going on with Yi-hwa’s friend group and Min-jae, which is likely going to be disastrous later, but I didn’t find these secondary storylines very compelling — though they did set Yi-hwa’s own internal crisis at an interesting angle. Her friend literally gets in a fight with her ex-husband’s mistress after just having dined with his current wife, and it’s loud and brash in all senses of the word. What a contrast to the deep, hidden, and interior struggles of our heroine, who can’t really seem to be her true self around anyone (except perhaps Min-jae in the future?).

Despite feeling like a smaller budget drama, Paper Moon still rakes up as much ambience as it can, and has a deep unsettledness nestled in most of the scenes (except for a select few). Adding even more layers, our heroine is always in white, as if a symbol of purity and goodness. Will Yi-hwa’s actions muddy her purity, or are her wrongful actions made pure because we know her intentions and her heart? In thinking over the drama’s themes, I can’t help but remember the drama’s tagline about this being as story of Yi-hwa’s life crumbling beautifully. There’s no better way to describe it.

 
RELATED POSTS

• Premiere Watch: Paper Moon
• Kim Seo-hyung’s life crumbles in Paper Moon
• Kim Seo-hyung stands at a crossroads in ENA’s Paper Moon
• First look at Kim Seo-hyung in ENA’s Paper Moon
• News bites: March 29, 2023
• News bites: March 11, 2023