SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Andante
(안단테 / Andante)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

I decided to watch this drama because I saw a trailer of it and it looked kinda cute, and from what I understood from the summary there would be something special about it.
I first thought that the main character would move to a village where strange things were happening and where the people at school were strange – almost as if there was something supernatural about it.
In the end, it was anything but supernatural. It was about real life. Life and death.

Of course a lot of people were excited about it because of Kai, but I’m not that into EXO and I hadn’t really seen him act before (instead of Seven First Kisses and EXO Next Door, where in both cases he played himself) so that wasn’t really a main reason for me to watch. As I said in the introduction, I don’t really like to judge dramas on the famous people acting in them, especially in the case of idols, because there’s a lot of dramas that prove idols aren’t necessarily good actors. And I didn’t know anyone else from the main cast (except maybe the mother and grandmother) so I really went in without any expectations.

So basically the story is about two siblings who live in Seoul with their mother (their father has been missing for 12 years) and their aunt (their mother’s younger sister). These two kids, Lee Shi Kyung (EXO’s Kai/Kim Jong In) and Lee Shi Young (Lee Ye Hyun) are troublemakers. Shi Kyung always skips school to go to the Internet cafe and has been fooling his mother into thinking that he’s doing great at school (including faking his report cards etc.) Shi Young enjoys some alternative cosplaying.
One day their mother finds out everything they’ve been hiding and doing behind her back and decides to take them away from their spoiled city life. She brings them with her to their grandmother (their father’s mother) who lives in the countryside. So the whole family of four, including the aunt, moves to the countryside. They haven’t been in contact with their grandmother for a long time so in the beginning Granny is hesitant to let them into her house, but she eventually does.
As Shi Kyung and Shi Young start school in their new neighborhood, they notice there are some weird things going on. The school has strange classes in which they need to lay in a coffin, have their own funeral portrait taken, have to think up their tombstone inscription and assemble funeral flower arrangements. The students also have to volunteer at the local hospice, a place where sick people who are past the point of being cured are basically waiting until they die.

At this point, I thought ‘Okay, so I’m guessing this drama is about some spoiled city kids who come to the countryside and actually learn to become more conscious and grateful of life and learn about the value of life and death.’ From the first day on, Shi Kyung is involved in happenings at the hospice and when someday suddenly passes away in front of him, this is a serious wake-up call for him. But that’s not all there was to it.

Shi Kyung also becomes interested in a (at first impression) mysterious girl, although we already find out in the second episode that she’s not actually mysterious because a part of her past is revealed in a flashback. She is a student in Shi Kyung’s class and also skips class a lot. Her name is Kim Bom. As time goes by, the two become closer and they start dating. Shi Young befriends another classmate named Park Ga Ram, whose father is the director of the hospice. They start dating eventually as well.

In the first half of the series, there are a lot of different happenings with different patients at the hospice that Shi Kyung and his friends get involved with and the episodes always end very emotionally but comforting at the same time. To me, it mainly showed how important it is to have no regrets and be with the people you care about until the last moment.

But then, a new plotline is introduced and this is where I started getting more and more confused. It is revealed that Bom’s father passed away in the hospice because of brain cancer when she was still very young. And then suddenly Bom collapses in the middle of class. Having seen too many K-Dramas already, the alarm bells in my head were immediately ringing: she has the same disease as her dad.
From here on I became more sceptical because it dealt with one of the drama tropes I dislike the most: someone turns out to have a terminal disease and instead of getting help and talking about it, they keep it to themselves and even push the people around them away. Maybe it is naive or even rude of me to say, but I always find this so selfish. There are enough things that you might keep to yourself because you are ashamed or don’t want anyone to find out for some reason. But if it’s about a disease – and certainly one that can’t be cured – you have all the right in the world to let other people worry about you. I can understand that it is very difficult to tell people, because you know it will break their hearts. But that will happen anyway! You can’t stop people from feeling sad about it. I just felt very frustrated with Bom that she went for the typical ‘I don’t want to cry and I don’t want others to cry so I’m gonna pretend it’s okay and eventually just disappear from everybody’s lives’. …So it’s okay if you die and no one knew and the people around you are even more heartbroken because you never told them? It’s okay as long as you don’t have to see them cry? Sorry but that was a very selfish thing to do. And especially towards Shi Kyung, whose father disappeared. I couldn’t believe it when she actually said ‘I’ll just disappear, just like his dad’. With that, my respect for Bom really went down.
Also I found it really harsh that Shi Kyung had to experience his girlfriend dying, I didn’t expect they’d go that far. The things he went through at the hospice seemed like good enough lessons for him to mature and become more caring about the value of life and death.

In the last few episodes I was just generally confused about the message of the series.
In the final episode they even rushed the plotline of his dad in last minute, resulting in Shi Kyung getting a major guilt trip about his dad’s disappearance and – as he discovers – death. And then suddenly his grandmother starts showing symptoms of dementia and Shi Kyung actually has to pretend to be his dad for her to ease her painful memory of not being able to give her son his favorite rice cakes before he left and never returned.
I just felt really sorry for Shi Kyung in the end because everything was going relatively well and he was learning and even getting along with Shi Young and his family better, and then suddenly his girlfriend dies and he remembers his father disappeared (and died) indirectly because of him.
And then suddenly everything was right again and he found peace and liked himself more as a person.

So yeah, I got a bit confused at the end. It reminded me a bit of Reunited Worlds, where the entire time I thought the plot would be about letting go of the past but then the main character decided not to let go of the past and I was like ‘…okay so what is this about then?’ And when I read the comments and they were all so positive like ‘great drama this and that’, I felt kind of lost because halfway through I couldn’t really take it seriously anymore because I had lost the sense and meaning of what I was actually watching.

I still feel like it was a portrayal of life and death and how to cope with loss and grief. It’s important to see your important people before it’s too late and not be obstructed by your feelings of shame or guilt regarding your illness or something. In that sense, the concept of the drama was very refreshing. But I just didn’t really see the additional value of Bom’s death and why they had to bring in the long-gone dad in the end. I felt like Shi Kyung had already learned enough without having to go through those two major loss experiences.

Despite the emotional depth of the series, they still managed to keep it quite light, and this I think was also reflected in the acting. Besides the amount of tears that were shed in the latter half of the series, most of the acting was light and comical. A lot of mother-getting-angry-at-her-son scenes and boy-daydreaming-of-his-girlfriend scenes.
I saw one comment criticizing that there was no actual kiss in the drama, but, even though I am a big fan of romance and good kissing scenes, I didn’t believe that was the point of the drama. If you’re marking it down because of that, you’re clearly missing the point. The relationship between Shi Kyung and Bom was very pure and they had a lot of cute moments holding hands and hugging each other. It was clear they liked each other very much and sometimes kissing isn’t even necessary.

Even though I had mixed feelings about Kai’s acting in the beginning, now I actually think it suited his character very well. Shi Kyung was often very impulsive and almost child-like and I think it needed to be to show his innocence. In order to see him clearly mature throughout the series. I will come back to you after I’ve seen more dramas with him to decide whether I think he’s a good actor or not (Haru ga Kita is on my list), but I think within the style of this drama, his acting was good enough.
I also thought the girl playing Bom (Kim Jin Kyung) was really pretty, and even though she didn’t have a lot of expression on her face, she was able to convey a lot through her eyes and I think that’s very remarkable.
As Shi Young, Lee Ye Hyun had kind of the same face the whole time, except for the moments where her cocky side melted away and we finally got some emotional response from her. I personally call it the ‘heol’ (헐) face – it’s the face that just constantly looks unimpressed and pissed off by everything.
I would have liked to see a little more depth in Park Ga Ram (Baek Chul Min)’s character, because now he was just the ‘nice best friend’ type of person but he didn’t really get his own storyline. And apart from that there were some other storylines that I would’ve liked to see develop more, such as the aunt and her triangle relationship with the teacher and the delinquent student.

Overall it was a refreshing theme, something I haven’t seen in dramas before and the thought behind it (if I got it right) is very comforting. Just some plot details that were kind of confusing for me and the sense that somewhere along the road they sort of lost sight of what they were trying to convey with the series.