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[HanCinema's Film Review] "Snow in Sea Breeze"

Seon-mi (played by Lee Young-ah) is a pharmacist with hemopoietic dysplasia. I'm not sure what exactly that is and "Snow in Sea Breeze" doesn't really make any serious effort to explain it. The point is that Seon-mi's sick, and will probably die sooner rather than later even if for the moment she's doing all right. In the meantime, though, life needs to be lived. And so she fatefully meets Sang-woo (played by Park Hae-jin), a swimming athlete whose work at the aquarium doing fun stuff like feeding penguins.

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Most of the scenes at or around the aquarium are a lot of fun. Director Kim Jeong-kwon definitely knows how to make romance look, well, at least fun even if tragedy's always right around the corner. There's also a certain plausible low-level aesthetic that's rather enjoyable. There is, as to be expected, an adorable proposal scene that's actually quite within Sang-woo's physical and economical capacities. The lack of excessive theatricality coupled with the obvious difficulty he had to go through go a long way to selling how generally down-to-earth this romance is, obvious melodrama trappings aside.

Well, not trappings really. "Snow in Sea Breeze" is a pretty unapologetic melodrama, for better or worse. One of the lovers is sick, and the very first scene implies that by the end something bad will happen to Sang-woo too. I'm sure that plenty of you reading this will find much to enjoy in a tender tragic love story involving events that no one would ever want to endure personally, however meaningful and heartfelt the romantic gestures that arise from these tragic circumstances are.

For those of you not emotionally inclined in such a way I have to be blunt. "Snow in Sea Breeze" contains pretty much every concievable element of a melodrama that people who dislike the genre like to mock. The early dates and courtship sequences are enjoyable enough- so much so that it's easy to see why Sang-woo is so clearly drawn to Seon-mi in spite of all the apparent drawbacks. She might be sick, but it doesn't define her life. At least until the disease forces Seon-mi to admit it.

And that's the deeper aspect of love that gives "Snow in Sea Breeze" some fairly genuine emotional strength. Sang-woo doesn't ignore Seon-mi's sickness out of romantic bravado. Rather, his motivation at least partially revolves around a dead little sister who died in similar tragic circumstances. The implication is less that Sang-woo is unrealistic as it is he knows what it's like to lose someone he loves, and this is acceptable to him. For Sang-woo, it's better to have loved and lost to have never loved at all. Just because Seon-mi's sick doesn't make her any less worthy of that.

It's all fine romantic sentiment. All the same the unnecessarily sad ending is a bit frustrating. Most of my goodwill regarding contrived plotting had been used up by Seon-mi being sick in the first place, so destroying the couple's happiness with a random accident just ends up being particularly cruel and pointless. But what can I say? It's a melodrama. "Snow in Sea Breeze" doesn't rise above the genre, nor is it so terrible as to make a mockery of it. This is a standard production that should give genre fans what they want, even if most anyone else probably won't be interested.

Review by William Schwartz

"Snow is on the Sea" is directed by Kim Jeong-kwon and features Park Hae-jin and Lee Young-ah.

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