Beautifully shot and more subtly unfolded than we’re often used to in dramaland, the premiere episode of Like Flowers in Sand is both melancholic and strangely settling. Perhaps it’s the strong sense of place and history, but the drama sets a strong tone with its setting alone, and introduces us to pieces of the story that will knit together later.
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EPISODE 1
Our drama opens with a sand drawing styled title sequence that’s just lovely, and not only points to the sand of the ssireum ring, but a metaphor we’re sure to dig into later. But for now we head straight into our wrestling match, with our hero KIM BAEK-DU (Jang Dong-yoon) walking solo into the arena.
In voiceover, courtesy of the fight announcer’s introduction of him, we hear everything we need to know: he was once considered a ssireum prodigy, but he stopped impressing after high school. Now, at 32, he has yet to win a single title. Well, we’re only two minutes in, and already Jang Dong-yoon has won me over with this performance, with all the fidgets and emotions made visible as he walks. We know so little about Baek-du at this point, but just watching him enter to the announcer’s introduction tells us more about him than words ever could. We’ll return to this culminating fight later on in the episode, but first we step back a bit to get to know the story and our hero a bit more.
Although Baek-du doesn’t act like he’s bothered, the weight of being considered a failure — and considering himself a failure — clearly follows him around. He has a particularly contentious relationship with “friend” KWAK JIN-SU (Lee Jae-joon), and the scene where we first see them interact is telling. At a reunion dinner, Baek-du is shoveling food into his mouth nonstop, ignoring Jin-su’s not-so-subtle taunts about the upcoming match. When Baek-du starts to choke, he slugs what he thinks is water — but surprise, it’s soju — so he ends up utterly drunk against his own intentions.
It’s not exactly optimal pre-fight behavior, but in a way it opens up Baek-du’s airways and he winds up drunk-calling his coach and telling him he wants to retire. “What’s the point of continuing something I’m horrible at?” he asks at one point, almost rhetorically. Later, the two will have a conversation about this, so that when we circle back to the match that we opened with, it’s with new context that this match will either start or end Baek-du’s career.
As fate would have it, Baek-du’s paired with a younger and stronger opponent who he’s already got some history with. Though he puts in his all for this nail-biter of a match, Baek-du winds up losing after the third round. His coach brushes the sand off of his back, proud of him for finishing the fight giving his all. Interestingly, across the ring, the winning wrestler is getting very different treatment from his coach.
As we’ve come to expect from this drama already, a lot more is shown than told, so as we follow Baek-du out of the arena and to the showers, he unwinds his satba (wrestling belt) and heaves a sigh into the mirror. We know all the disappointment and heaviness he’s feeling — ennui even — and that emotion pervades through the episode. In a particularly strong example of this, the night before the match, Baek-du was eating a meal while his mom (an impressive chameleon performance by Jang Young-nam) yells at her drama on TV and doesn’t pay him much attention. It’s when Baek-du manages to say, “I’m nervous,” that we realize the weight of all the unsaid things in this story.
While Baek-du’s wrestling career is the main plot line, there’s a lot going on with the secondary characters and storylines, most of whom are just barely introduced so far. For instance, Jin-su hangs out at a random coffee shop that’s run by JOO MI-RAN (Kim Bora), who sports some amazing strawberry-blonde hair, an air of insouciance, and could swear that the English word “coffee” only had one “e” when she learned it. That’s why her coffee shop is called Ran’s Coffe.
But perhaps the most mysterious figure that hangs over the story is that of someone called “Doo-shik.” Interwoven through the first episode, we see Baek-du remember this young friend in a beautiful seaside sequence. We don’t know much about the relationship yet, but we know it was a meaningful one to Baek-du. And later, we learn the same of Jin-su, so perhaps their falling out was over Doo-shik — who, we later learn, was a girl.
Speaking of mysterious girls, there’s one (Lee Joo-myung) seen wandering through the town, and she’s grabbing the attention of the neighborhood ajusshis and ajummas alike. She has a strong presence, and walks around in a white dress with a red parasol, even at night. Even Baek-du runs into her one evening in an alleyway on his way home, clocks her, but doesn’t think much of it until later…
In our closing scene, after his disappointing final match and on the cusp of retirement, Baek-du is poking around the neighborhood where it looks like someone is moving in nearby. He hears a rustling behind him and the next thing we know he’s been thrown to the ground. When he opens his eyes and the mysterious young woman is hanging over him and offering a hand up, it’s the perfect callback to the memorable scene of Doo-shik doing the same to him at the beach. In that moment, Baek-du is convinced, and he asks her right away if she’s Doo-shik.
It’s a beautiful first episode that’s slow but interesting, and full of unspoken things. As I mentioned earlier, the setting works magic here, and feels so authentically inhabited. The satoori is wonderful. There’s the pervasive feeling of being stuck in time, but it also feels like there’s something brewing.
In addition to the devolution of Baek-du’s wrestling career, and the arrival of (maybe) Doo-shik, there’s also a drowning investigation going on in the background. Detectives from Seoul are in town, pretending it’s not a big case, but pinging the radar of our local cops. Indeed, this drowning will weave into the cloth of this story somehow, since the death and the arrival of our unnamed female are so eerily in sync.
Though it’s hard to predict the trajectory of the story just yet, Like Flowers in Sand was 10/10 in tone for me. It was mysterious, but not overly so. Atmospheric, but not draggy or depressing, and full of realistic, lived-in detail. And though subtle, it introduced a lot of storytelling layers that I’m looking forward to unpacking as we go.