[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Sensible Love" Episode 3

The courtship between Il-ri and Hee-tae reaches an abrupt denouement here. To be entirely honest I was expecting the drama to just skip past this part and go right to the post-wedding period, but the courtship section is so short that's pretty much exactly what happens anyway. Their relationship really does just seem to be a simple matter of, hey, we're not teacher and student anymore, nothing creepy, let's get hitched.

"Sensible Love" continues to defy genre expectations, though, particularly in design. Note the musical cues. On multiple occasions director Han Ji-seung deliberately implies that we're going to get a deep romantic moment only to cheapen it with an awkward joke almost immediately afterward. Normally these genre conventions are used for comedy, but here nothing about the situation is all that funny. While they might sound amusing in an anecdote years later on, in the immediate context, they just make the Il-ri / Hee-tae relationship feel weird.

For what it's worth the Il-ri / Joon relationship isn't doing much better. So far they just seem like two people who really don't particularly like each other. It doesn't matter if Lee Soo-hyuk looks really great with his shirt off when in context this just seems annoying. To Il-ri anyway. From my end Joon doesn't seem like that bad a guy, and it wasn't exactly unreasonable of him to assume that his partner for this job was going to be a man.

Aside from these relationships...well, the drama's still a little difficult to parse honestly. We see what married life looks like for Il-ri, and it's not really all that terrible. It's not a lovey-dovey fantasy but I don't think she was expecting that much anyway. Actually it's not all that clear what any character really wants, just dealing with the ins and outs of daily life. Hee-tae's motivations are pretty transparent, though. The man really does love his research.

Is that why Hee-tae gave in so easily to Il-ri's advances? Because the prospect of having to expend serious effort to find a romantic partner didn't appeal to him? At this point any theory is probably a plausible one. The preview makes it clear that the situation with Il-ri and Joon is going to escalate really quickly, even though we've seen almost no evidence that this will end well. And that's before taking her married status into account. It certainly does a lot to build up curiosity in terms of where "Sensible Love" is heading, even if I'm getting a little impatient for an actual delivery.

Review by William Schwartz

"Sensible Love" is directed by Han Ji-seung, written by Kim Do-woo and features Uhm Tae-woong, Lee Si-young, Lee Soo-hyuk, Choi Yeo-jin, Im Ha-ryong, Lee Young-ran and more.

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