[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Dating Agency: Cyrano" Episode 11

I came away from this episode feeling a little indifferent. It's not bad, really. The characters are all true-to-form, there's some few good gags staggered throughout, and the current love manipulation scheme proceeds at a reasonable clip. It all just felt sort of empty. What I've really liked about "Dating Agency: Cyrano" is the way it's been taking very specific situations and relating them to broader, more abstract experiences. There's very little of that here, as this episode is about coming back into love after trauma.

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There isn't anything wrong with this kind of plot. I was a big fan of "Love 911", a movie last year which covered a lot of the same ground. But the reason I enjoyed that movie was because there was a depth and seriousness to the portrayal that really gets analytical with the characters. "Dating Agency: Cyrano" can't do that, because the couple in this context aren't fully-fleshed characters. They're guest stars who, like all the guest stars before them, fit into general archetypes. It's awkward and conflicting for the tone.

As an example- at one point, Byeong-Hoon conspires to get close to the target by pretending to be a therapeutic consultant. It's fun on one end, because we've never seem Byeong-Hoon do much acting before. At the same time, it's a little unsettling. So far, everyone has been pretending to be unskilled, unremarkable people who through the magic of (conspired) circumstance are able to befriend the target at just the right moment. Byeong-Hoon is not, as far as I can tell, actually qualified to be giving this kind of advice. And the fact that his gambit works just seems to be sending a bad message.

For what it's worth, most of the episode isn't really about the manipulated couple anyway. There's a lot of drama going on at the Cyrano Agency, as unexpected characters meet and trade information that causes a great deal of uncertainty about how anyone's supposed to move forward with anything. But a lot of this is just not very memorable. I never noticed it quite so much before, but the intersection between the manipulation and the Agency drama is actually really essential. The comparison and contrasts add a lot to how we see both. The lack of a clear analogy this episode really hurts the impression it makes.

While this is all fairly problematic, it's not enough to turn me off the drama just yet. A curious twist at the end leaves the storyline in a peculiar place where once again it's not clear how the storyline can succeed. At any rate, the next episode should be more clearly bombastic than this one. Going by past experience, "Dating Agency: Cyrano" is at its strongest when it's at its most probable.

Review by William Schwartz

"Dating Agency: Cyrano" is directed by Kang Kyeong-hoon, written by Shin Jae-won and features Lee Jong-hyuk, Choi Soo-young, Hong Jong-hyun and Jo Yoon-woo.