[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Our Beloved Summer" Episode 12

The previous epilogue featured a tearful Woong telling Yeon-soo about the recurring dream of being abandoned by his father. I assumed this was a flashback, a sincere confession of Woong's own insecurities, and a hint of an unhappy childhood prior to his present day loving parents. But after watching episode twelve, I'm unsure whether this incident was a flashback, whether Woong was in serious anguish or just emotionally drunk, and also whether the abandonment ever actually happened or if it was literally just a dream.

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This is nothing new for the often baffling way that "Our Beloved Summer" is edited, which makes it difficult to tell what's happening or which parts are important or why any of it is important. Screenwriter Lee Na-eun-I just seems to lose interest in plot points within a few minutes of their being introduced. This has been to the drama's great detriment, killing nearly all sense of urgency.

Elsewhere, this episode opens up with a clip from what is presumably the television documentary Ji-woong has been working on this entire time. There's no mention of how short clips of the original documentary have gone viral on the Internet in the ten years since it first aired, or of how Woong and Yeon-soo got together as a couple and then broke up. Almost nothing in this clip explains why the documentary project even exists.

The main thing we do get is a terribly edited clip where Sol-i talks about Yeon-soo. It's terribly edited in the sense that the camera is making obvious, choppy cuts between two completely different interviews, both of which were just Sol-i talking about Yeon-soo from behind her bar. The camera was, rather inexplicably, placed in a different enough position for these interviews that the footage could not be edited without very abrupt zoom-outs and zoom-ins.

This is just incedibly sloppy camerawork. The inclusion of such a detail in the scene is baffling, since it has nothing to do with what Sol-i is talking about and just seems to make the documentary crew look incompetent. I feel this way about most of "Our Beloved Summer" in regards to the writing. So much of it is just pointlessly distracting in a way that's simply frustrating. "Our Beloved Summer" leans hard on the chemistry of their leads and here especially, the quality of their kiss scenes. Most of the actual structure is borderline unprofessional.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Our Beloved Summer" is directed by Kim Yoon-jin-I, written by Lee Na-eun-I, and features Choi Wooshik, Kim Da-mi, Kim Sung-cheol, Roh Jeong-eui, Ahn Dong-goo, Park Won-sang. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/12/06~Now airing, Mon, Tue 22:00 on SBS.

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