Last week in my review of "The World of Us" I implied that empty soju bottles are normally shorthand for an abusive low-class patriarch. This was misleading. They are also another equally common shorthand for depression, at least when it concerns struggling members of the reflective bourgeoisie. Such is the case in"Our Dating History" for aspiring film professionals Yeon-i (played by Jeon Hye-bin) and Seon-jae (played by Shin Min-chul). They married impulsively, they divorced impulsively, and must for the moment live in the same apartment while drowning their vocational sorrows with fruit pouch soju.
I didn't even realize there was such a thing as fruit pouch soju until watching "Our Dating History", although it really is the perfect counterpart to soju bottles. The metaphor is so elegant- alcohol for the person who wants to get drunk, yet does not want to do so as an adult. It's the ideal drink for Seon-jae, who has rather meekly acceded to Yeon-i's demand for a divorce when both still have mixed feelings.
It's even better for Yeon-i herself, who constantly tries to provoke Seon-jae for reasons even she doesn't fully understand. Yeon-i has a very abrasive personality that's rather lacking in charm. When Yeon-i wants to take a shot at someone, she just does it without thinking much of the consequences. While in a more romantic movie this would be an idealized trait, "Our Dating History" makes it clear that married or not it's really not at all easy to get along with Yeon-i, and she's the main obvious culprit for why the couple's film projects never seem to go anywhere.
Although generally presented as a crazy ex-girlfriend, Yeon-i is almost always the perspective character. This gives the odd impression that Yeon-i is the villain of her own life story. And yet Yeon-i, although frequently anti-self-reflective, never veers all the way to explicitly unlikable because she is fully aware of her own jerkish behavior. For that matter Yeon-i is also fairly resigned to inevitable failure, almost as if it's a kind of karmic retribution.
Everything seems to happen backwards in "Our Dating History". Yeon-i and Seon-jae's unsatisfied divorced life does not feel any different than their probably unsatisfied married life did. Professional success comes quickly, and slips further and further away as interpersonal conflict wrecks the relationships Yeon-i and Seon-jae have with other people. The tone is so fatalistic that even the initial optimism feels, in retrospect, rather horribly misplaced.
The same can be written of the film's own duality- writer/director Cho Seungeun seems to be arguing that for a stubborn tenacious woman like Yeon-i, or for a man like Seon-jae in thrall to her, only absolute failure is enough to make them give up and start over from square one. While it's an unpleasant and ego-killing step to make, it is nonetheless one that needs to be made. "Our Dating History" is able to get just barely enough mild uncomfortable laughs out of this inherently awkward set-up to prevent the story from being depressing. Although even then, it's never quite actually uplifting.
Source:HanCinema
