The recent wave of teenage-love-oriented K-dramas left many people still in a baffled, nostalgic daze. With open endings that wrenched our hearts and unexpected twists that made us bawl our eyes out, anyone who says they finished watching a movie on first love unfazed would surely be lying.
For the longest time, young adult content is associated with “cliche” and “unrealistic happy endings.” It appears that to counter such stereotypes of romantic teenage love content, filmmakers havE increasingly made sure the ending is the opposite of happy by throwing in random events that force characters apart or strange, irrational plot twists. Anything but conforming to the cliche.
Yet the word cliche itself depends foremost on repetition. With the amount of misunderstandings between young couples, the must-have long distance which eventually leads to rifts between them and to some extent even death of characters, it would actually be rarer at this point to find a teenage drama that solely focuses on first love itself than to find a film centered around misunderstandings and regrets. Filmmakers wish to feature regrets and unexpected events to make stories more relevant and realistic, but perhaps they missed sending a subtle reminder of why the story was told in the first place. Overly staged coincidences and unforeseeable events are slowly tainting the way that regret and chance are supposed to be unpredictable and shocking.
The worst part about being young and in love is knowing both being young and being in love are ephemeral. The moment we realize we’ve fallen in love, we are already on the way to falling out of it. But the best part of being young and in love is knowing that, while everything will eventually end, it will never disappear. This is because love is something you hold onto it. Just like the actress Kim Yoo-Jung’s character in 20th Century Girl put it so simply, “Why would you think that I could ever forget?”
After all, there is really no specific way to portray or define love. Every audience already has their perceptions blended with personal experiences when delving into a movie. Life is not staged, but movies are. No matter how much effort a writer puts into making the movie resemble real life, there will always be artificiality. If the plot has originality, it might be better to let it flow through its natural path instead of distorting all logical senses just to create an “artistic achievement.”
If I could turn our story into a movie, the worst part might still be having regrets that are involved with you. But because you took part in my regrets, I don’t regret anything anymore.