[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Melancholia" Episode 4

Teacher Ji makes an interesting comment about the Math Olympiad midway through this episode. She reconceptualizes it as a festival rather than a competition. The purpose of the speech competition isn't to win, but to present interesting ideas to peers. We can see when everyone finally arrives at the Math Olympiad that this is the general attitude of the displays and the speeches. The whole scene is filled with nerdy enthusiasm.

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The contrast with much of the preceding set up is striking. Teacher Ji is constantly reminded in her interactions with other adults that fairness isn't the point. There's a constant presumption that the Math Olympiad has to be competitive. What's more, Teacher Ji is also constantly told that she shouldn't treat it as meritocratic. This completely flies in the face of the more wholesome image of education that Teacher Ji is trying to present to her students.

For the sake of narrative structure Teacher Ji only really has two students at the moment- Seung-yoo and Ye-rin. And we can see that despite Ye-rin's paranoia over Seung-yoo's favoritism Teacher Ji really wants to help Ye-rin too. The issue is that the other adults are obviously planning to cheat to make sure that Ye-rin wins the speech competition. So they're careful to keep Ye-rin away from Teacher Ji because the poor girl is close to cracking, and they'd rather she see Teacher Ji as an enemy than a friend.

On that note we can still see Headmistress No ruminating over the obviously photoshopped picture of Teacher Ji and Seung-yoo. Isolating Ye-rin from Teacher Ji has the unplanned benefit of effectively forcing Teacher Ji to show favoritism to Seung-yoo. Ye-rin has resources to prepare for the speech on her own. Seung-yoo doesn't. And typical high school student that he is, Seung-yoo barely even has any idea where to start. Hence the Jeju trip, which is unlikely to go by unnoticed just because Teacher Ji did the proper paperwork.

The Jeju trip, while implausibly expansive for a day trip, does get into some of the island's more offbeat landmarks. I think I saw some of Itami Jun's work in those montages- I wrote about that a couple years ago actually. Teacher Ji's comments about the importance of not getting obsessed with solutions for the sake of solutions really spoke to me. Much of the most important learning of my own life was incidental, coming from broadening horizons rather than any specific goal.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Melancholia" is directed by Kim Sang-hyeob, written by Kim Ji-woon-II, and features Lee Do-hyun, Lim Soo-jung, Choi Dae-hoon, Oh Gwang-rok, Jeon Guk-hyang, Han Ki-joong. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/11/10~Now airing, Wed, Thu 22:30 on tvN.