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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Drama Special - Slow"

Ji-won (played by Kwak Dong-yeon) is a taciturn high school baseball player with hopes of continuing his career at a higher level. Taciturnity is the key word there. "Drama Special - Slow" is distinct among television dramas in that it has very little dialogue. This isn't because writer Kim Joo-man-I is employing a specific weird gimmick. It's just that Ji-won is a genuinely antisocial guy, who doesn't have any other friends on the team. An unexpected injury does not improve his popularity either.

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Neither does Ji-won's emerging romantic subplot with cello player Jeong-yeon (played by Jung Soo-ji) involve much dialogue, and what little dialogue we do get is very stilted, uncomfortable, and weird. Really, even calling it a romantic subplot is a tad misleading, since they only go on one strange date that I'm not sure is actually a date. It's just noteworthy in that Jeong-yeon's hobbies are so completely out there that they're rather beyond Ji-hoon's comprehension.

So too, does Jeong-yeon not really understand baseball, giving up almost immediately on spectating one of Ji-won's games. So what's she doing in the story at all? Because in the context of the main plot, which is about Ji-won struggling to recover from the psychological memory of his injury, focusing on the sound of Jeong-yeon's cello music allows Ji-won to enter a different emotional zone that allows him to comprehend baseball in a different way that renders the game playable again.

I'm making that storyline sound a lot more straightforward than it actually is. One of the problems with having such limited dialogue is that there are almost no clearly designated stakes. It's never completely clear what actual goal Ji-won is playing for, since he doesn't like his team and they don't like him. Beyond that Ji-won also approaches the game of baseball with such obvious anger it doesn't even seem like he enjoys it that much. So why doesn't he just quit?

That's not a criticism of an inconsistency in the script, because that is in fact exactly the kind of thought process teenagers go through. They will continue a certain action largely out of inertia and ennui rather than wonder what exact point their actions are serving. That's why the slow-motion scenes are such an obvious break from the normal continuity of awkward adolescent rage. At least, it certainly feels significant that Ji-won only barely notices the final score of his last game- although it's unclear what that significance is to him, or even to us.

Review by William Schwartz

"Drama Special - Slow" is directed by Lim Se-joon and written by Kim Joo-man-I and features Kwak Dong-yeon, Jung Soo-ji and Ki Do-hoon.

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