dangermousie | Friend episode 2 - death, devastation, and...perfection

I know I have posted about the period gangster saga Friend Our Legend occasionally but I have never done proper episode reviews or recaps.

Well, I am snowed in and I have never finished the drama (there was so much going on with it that I couldn't do my usual trick and fast-forward or do something else while watching. Not to mention it was emotionally exhausting) so I have embarked on a completion/rewatch - it has been some time since I saw the earlier episodes so I decided not just to complete the remaining episodes but to go back and rewatch from the start. Or namely, from ep 2 as I have rewatched ep 1 previously.

In case you are not aware, Friend is a 20-ep drama adaptation of a famous movie of the same name, done by the same director/writer as the movie. It is set in the 1980s-1991 and stars Hyun Bin, Kim Min Joon, Seo Do Young and others as small-town childhood friends torn apart by the Mob rivalries.

Everyone acts wonderfully in it, but the drama belongs to Hyun Bin (in a heart-breaking arc of a lonely, desperately gentle soul progressing to fully blown killer psycho) and Kim Min Joon (as his former best friend, now deadly rival. I knew Hyun Bin could be amazing, but I did not know Kim Min Joon could be). The story loops in a non-linear fashion, starting out with a mob hit - Hyun Bin's character is stabbed to death and Kim Min Joon is prosecuted for it. Only the irony of ironies is - KMJ was planning a hit on him but he never had a chance to carry it out - someone else did it instead. And from then on it loops back into childhood and adolescence and the story which brought the two best friends to this point.

In addition to everything, the drama is so gorgeously shot. It looks like a movie.

Kim Min Joon relives Hyun Bin's assassination...

I loved this scene with his wife (as we learned from ep 1, she was somehow connected to Hyun Bin too), as she comforts him and tells him she knows he did not do it but he tells her about how he planned on ordering it even if he didn't do it yet.

He's still shocked in jail.

Telling his wife not to bring their son there.

And then in court he pleads guilty.

(side note, I love Seo Do Young as this intellectual who is friends with these gangsters due to common upbringing SO MUCH).

A flashback to the story proper...

Side note - I love how suitably dingy everything is, from the bars to the bar girls - those aren't actress glamor ladies...

I think it's also significant that Seo Do Young's character and the one of the joker kid (whose name escapes me) are the only ones with a normal family - Kim Min Joon comes from the Mob (with his mother dead of illness when he was a child) and Hyun Bin lives with his emotionally shut-down undertaker father and occasional visits from his men-obsessed mother. They probably cling to the friendship in part so much because there is no warmth or emotion elsewhere.

Hyun Bin burning his boxing trophies (in a previous episode he won a match - his ticket to University, but it was mislabelled a foul due to some underhanded behind-the-scenes stuff and he was kicked out). He can try again at some point, of course, but he strikes me as frighteningly absolutist - in a way, he is the biggest idealist of them all. It also strikes me this whole episode how frighteningly lost he is - SDY can go to Seoul University, Joker Kid is very well-adjusted and is content in here and now, and Kim Min Joon is a born leader with this strong drive. But Hyun Bin is just lost - and drowning in about a million various hurts none of which he can articulate.

With his father.

SDY, first in his class.

A teacher tells him he will achieve nothing and he loses it, but is restrained by KMJ. In a way, it's a pattern for them.

Coming home and one of many returns of his mother...

Somking and getting caught.

Their boys school does some sort of an event with a partner girls school. And this is where they first see Min Ji Hye's character (who will later become Kim Min Joon's wife) and three of the four friends - Hyun Bin, Kim Min Joon, and Seo Do Young, are immediately drawn to her on various levels - because of her beauty and her singing but also because of their own inner emptiness needing to be filled in any way possible.