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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Woman who Married Three Times" Episode 11

It's rather telling that, in the midst of an obvious crisis when any emotionally well-adjusted family would be in a panic, the people in Lady Choi's seem to have trouble summoning up any kind of emotion at all when their matriarch appears to suffer a severe collapse. The apathy is almost comical. The fact that the first we see of this woman is not in a hospital, but her own bedroom only adds to how problematic the situation is.

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This could be easily labelled all of this as part of a deliberate performance designed to indicate the general unhealthiness of this family's psychological well-being. But "The Woman who Married Three Times" currently suffers from a problem that makes such analysis dubious. The drama's kind of really boring. Watching the family members not care about Lady Choi's collapse made me realize that I don't really care either.

I'm not actually all that sure what's even supposed to be happening in this drama anymore in terms of narrative thrust. The recap at the beginning of this episode makes a specific point of reminding us about the potential of a scandal to embroil the families in crisis and then...we don't really explore that at all. Plenty of weak efforts are made to promise that later on there could be potential conflicts, as characters discuss future plans, but this doesn't distract from the fact that nothing of any particular interest is happening right now.

There's not even an emotional conflict worth mentioning. The family with custody of Seul-gi is struck with crisis, so they send her to the other grandparents for safekeeping. That's...again, that's nice and all, but it's not terribly interesting. I'd be a bit curious to see how Eun-soo reacts to the news about what happened to Lady Choi- however, she's off engaged in her own rather boring domicility subplot, where her worries are so laughably minor even the other characters don't take them seriously.

Potentially, there could be some sort of parallelism going on here- comparing Eun-soo's old life with her new one. But "The Woman who Married Three Times" isn't really making any effort to clarify the connections between these events. At this point the drama is just about a bunch of things that happen. Without any bite or urgency, there's barely anything worth criticizing, putting the drama in the additional awkward position of being a rather uninteresting kind of bad story. I can only hope that people involved in its production can come up with, and stick by, a concept that inspires more excitement in the moment.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Woman who Married Three Times" is directed by Son Jeong-hyeon and written by Kim Su-hyun and features Lee Ji-ah, Uhm Ji-won, Song Chang-eui and Ha Seok-jin.

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