Qfour years of production cost like everything Game of thronesand as the protagonist the actor most loved of the East. An effort that has transformed Pachinkoimposing fresco that came out on Apple Tv + last March 25, in a TV series certainly among the best of this 2022. And that is sure to garner many Emmys and Golden Globes. In fact, both the public and compact critics like it in defining it as a fictional masterpiece.
Fairly loose transposition of Min-jin Lee’s bestseller (The Korean wife; one of Obama’s favorite novels of 2021), Pachinko it is the umpteenth consecration of the acclaimed k-drama (kind of which Squid Game is the most famous case). In turn, the most recent expression of the rampant popularity of Korean nouvelle vague represented by Parasite And Minari.
And just to the protagonist of the latter, Youn Yuh-jungthe first Korean to win an Oscar for best supporting role, is entrusted with the task of playing the heroine of the series, Sunja. And his troubled existence from infancy to old age, over a period of time that covers 70 years and three countries: Korea, Japan and the United States.
(Apple Tv +)
The history of Sunja, the history of the world
Born in the 1920s of the last century, Sunja is the daughter of the village’s two Korean pariahs – united by love and tremendous misfortune. Wise and cautioushowever, the girl lets herself be seduced by a rich and powerful, and irresistibly attractive man. Unfortunately married to the daughter of a yakuza – the Japanese mafia – who made him his right arm, and for whom he combines business with the Koreans (at the time subjugated by the Japanese empire).
For Sunja the meeting with Koh Hansu (Lee Min-Ho) constitutes the event that determines its entire future, a love story on the edge of a stormy historical period marked by wars and by the name backpackswith which the Japanese they designated Korean immigrants in the cities of the Land of the Rising Sun..
It is also history of his children, his grandchildren, his mother and sister-in-lawher husband and Hansu, but also the chronicle of four eras up to the eighties of the American yuppies, the westernization of the East and Japan’s beloved gambling game of Pachinko. Often run by immigrants in game rooms that enriched many naturalized Japanese Koreans.
The young Sunja is played by Kim Min-haalmost new actress with an impressive talent. His character speaks little and suffers a lot, and has a Dickensian tendency to immolation (Dickens is also writer Min-jin Lee’s favorite author). His sense of duty is unshakable, his seriousness exemplary. But Sunja lives with a very great guilt: that of the bond with a violent and ruthless gangster. Formally protector of her and her family (who would not have survived without her attentions).
Lee Min-Ho, the star of Pachinko
The differences between series and novel can be summarized in the presence of Lee Min-Hoalmost a deity in South Korea. The 35-year-old actor has become an idol over a decade does thanks to Boys Over Flowers, seminal teen drama for an entire generation; testimonials of dozens of brand Asians, as well as Hugo Boss and Fendi, today he is one of the most important influencers on the planet, with an Instagram profile of thirty million followers.
Soo Hughthe show’s producer, took advantage of her immense popularity significantly expanding the character of Koh Hansu. Indeed, he did more: he transformed him from a tough and dull villain in a bad boy with a tragic past and an irresistible look.
Lee Min-Ho. (Apple Tv +)
Lee Min-Ho admitted he was inspired to Al Pacino in The Godfather and gangster stories from the 1940s, but costume designer Chae Kyung-hwa dressed Hansu as a cross between a beautiful Lucky Luciano and a very elegant Al Capone: wrapped in impeccable pinstripes, the garment surmounted by a Borsalino, the charm of a beauty of yesteryearthe face of a dangerous and vengeful type.
The reconstruction of an era
To Hansu the narration dedicates the most spectacular episode of Pachinkoaffixed to the dramatic past in a fascinating and meticulous historical reconstruction. Delightfully manic. From the sequence of the market copied from period images ai original fabrics from the Thirties and Sixties.
It confers so much rigor to the setting a tangible realismpowerful enough to make the atmosphere of the series palpable, heavy with melancholy and grief. Introduced, however, and in a brilliant way, by an opening theme in pastel shades in which the costumed actors indulge in wild and joyful dances (minus Lee Min-Ho, who said he did not “dance not even dead»).
(Apple Tv +)
However, it’s not just Sunja and Hansu – a myriad of characters orbit around them painful and lovable, like sister-in-law Kyung-hee and her husband Isak (the statuesque supermodel Steve Noh from Sense8).
And the end result is a period drama intense and touching, never pathetic or sentimentala hymn to willpower and resourcefulness of Asian immigrants (most of the same producers and actors as Pachinko are American descendants of Korean exiles)celebrated through the story of a woman who is both ordinary and extraordinary.
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