Binge-worthy: Period K-drama When Life Gives You Tangerines will make you laugh and cry

When Life Gives You Tangerines

Netflix ★★★★★

Looking at the poster for the period K-drama When Life Gives You Tangerines, with its stars – singer-actress IU and actor Park Bo-gum – holding hands in a field of canola flowers, it is perhaps easy to mistake the series for a romance.

While romance is certainly prominent in the 16-parter – separated into four volumes, each representing a season – it would be a disservice to confine a story of such scope and heart into a single category.

The show, which spans three generations and decades from the 1950s onwards, is a series about love, family, survival and trauma.

Here are three reasons to tune in to the lives of spirited Ae-sun (played by IU as a young woman and Moon So-ri in middle age) and her loyal husband Gwan-sik (Park Bo-gum at first and Park Hae-joon in middle age). 

1. An epic of the ordinary

Set on the island of Jeju, there are neither wars nor monsters to fight. Yet, the series is an epic – albeit one of the ordinary sort.

The Herculean task Ae-sun and Gwan-sik face – from childhood friends to high school sweethearts to young parents – is the monumental endeavour of being alive, with all its joys and sorrows.

Audiences see them grow up, fall in love, rebel and take leaps of faith – like when they attempt to elope to Busan. We see them become parents, struggle to put food on the table, celebrate wins and grieve the losses they suffer.

Their lives might be mundane, but these are lives fully lived, and that feels grand and awe-inspiring.

2. Mothers and daughters

IU, whose real name is Lee Ji-eun, pulls double duty, playing young Ae-sun and her grown-up daughter Geum-myeong.

Geum-myeong is intelligent, ambitious and confident. And the series shows how she is the culmination of women who gave up their dreams, bowed down to fate and swallowed their pride.

Ae-sun’s long-dead mother Gwang-rye (Yeom Hye-ran), who appears in flashbacks and dream sequences, was a haenyeo, a female free diver who harvests seafood. It is a lowly paid and dangerous job. Gwang-rye worked herself to death to ensure Ae-sun will never be a haenyeo and is free to chase her dreams of being a poet.

Ae-sun escapes being a haenyeo, but does not end up as a writer or going to university. She becomes a housewife to a fisherman and repeats Gwang-rye’s cycle of sacrifice – working, cooking, cleaning every day – in the hope that Geum-myeong will have options she never got to enjoy.

3. Heart-rending acting

While the cast is uniformly very good in their roles, the show is, at its core, about three generations of women.

The trio of actresses who take on this mantle – Yeom, Moon and IU – give subtle yet touching performances that will make one laugh and cry.

One can feel the strain of hard menial work on the mind and body of the character played by Yeom, and it lends her performance an emotional heft.

Moon, playing a middle-aged Ae-sun, does a wonderful job capturing a youthfulness of spirit, allowing young Ae-sun’s cheekiness and bashfulness to peek through a more mellow version of the character.

With IU playing not one but two central characters, the series’ success hangs on her performance and she more than lives up to the task.

As teenage Ae-sun, she is naive, idealistic and giddily in love with Gwan-sik. As a young mum, she is someone trying her best, who is also often crushed by how little her best accomplishes.

And as Geum-myeong, she balances a delicate mix of emotions – thankful, guilty and frustrated at how much her parents had to sacrifice for her.