"Drama Special - Taste of Curry"

Yoo-mi (played byJeon Hye-bin) has achieved her dream of opening a curry shop. Suddenly, with no apparent explanation, a slightly younger man appears by the name of Kyeong-po (played byHyeon Woo). Kyeong-po takes an immense interest in the curry shop, as well as in Yoo-mi personally. The central mystery of the drama is who Kyeong-po is and why he's suddenly flitted into Yoo-mi's life.

On the surface level anyway. The more relevant and interesting question is why Yoo-mi opened up a curry shop in the first place. Curry is a pretty specific kind of food. Not everyone knows how to make it. One of the milder conflicts of the drama is over the recipe Yoo-mi uses and the question of whether or not it can be improved. But all of this is besides the point anyway. There is no inherent quality to curry that causes Yoo-mi to want to make it. The value to her is sentimental.

"Drama Special - A Taste of Curry" is about that nostalgic sentiment- and the desire we as adults have to try and relive those truly joyful moments of childhood through the faint reminder of whatever object we most closely connect with bygone love. For Yoo-mi that object is curry. As we see in flashback there's a good reason for her to have this belief- and yet the curry shop itself doesn't seem to do much to instill this sense of nostalgia in Yoo-mi's heart. Nor does the revelation concerning Kyeong-po's motives.

If there's any flaw in this drama, it's that the story spends a lot of time just hovering around. It's only near the end that we finally get a clear explanation as to who Kyeong-po is- but this revelation is the lynchpin that holds all the drama's emotional resonance. Before we find out what Kyeong-po wants, Yoo-mi's adventures in the curry shop meander. Granted, in retrospect, this ambivalence is the whole point- in the moment, though, the drama can sometimes feel boring and pointless without that one essential hook tying everything together.

But when that moment of revelation hits, when Yoo-mi finally figures out what she's really been looking for this whole time- the catharsis is wonderful. The closing shot is a beautiful look inside the minds of Yoo-mi and Kyeong-po, exposing that for all the pain, all the hurt of realizing the past may have been a lie, they're both still looking for that sense of intimacy, that feeling from bygone days. The facts and logic of the situation don't matter when all that comes to head. Even if curry is just a meaningless talisman of love, well, that's good enough isn't it?

Review by William Schwartz

"Drama Special - Taste of Curry" is directed byHan Sang-woo, written byHong Jeong-heeand featuresJeon Hye-bin,Hyeon WooandOh Mi-hee