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Pierce Conran

This article contains minor spoilers.
3/5 stars
Lead cast: Kim Seon-ho, Go Youn-jung
The Hong Sisters, the masterminds behind Hotel Del Luna and Alchemy of Souls, return with the first of their two new series this year, the globetrotting romance Can This Love Be Translated?
Kim Seon-ho (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha) is back in romance mode as an interpreter who crosses paths with a rising starlet, played by Go Youn-jung (Moving).


The story opens in Japan, where talented polyglot Joo Ho-jin (Kim) bumps into pre-stardom Cha Mu-hee (Go), both having journeyed there on desperate romantic missions.
Ho-jin hopes that a long-ago promise he made to meet Shin Ji-sun (Lee E-dam, The Queen Who Crowns) at an observatory will be kept, while Mu-hee is on the warpath to confront the woman she believes stole her boyfriend.
Instead, the pair meet each other, and while timing and a train crossing conspire to keep them apart, the seed has been planted.
Later, Mu-hee scores a leading role in a zombie film, but on the last day of production she takes a fall during a stunt and ends up in a coma. When she wakes six months later, she has become a global icon thanks to the film’s surprise success.

She is soon cast alongside Japanese star Hiro Kurosawa (Sota Fukushi) in a romantic travel reality series, and Ho-jin, who is fluent in English, Japanese and Italian, is hired as the show’s interpreter.
A romantic connection is teased between Mu-hee and Hiro from the opening, in which he confesses his feelings to her mid-shoot in Tuscany. Ho-jin faces his own dilemma when Ji-sun, who is supposed to marry his brother, shows up on the shoot as a substitute producer.
Despite these complications, the central romance kicks into gear surprisingly early. Romantic second stringers Hiro and Ji-sun thus feel sidelined, consigned to filler roles early in the story, though Ji-sun does get her own romantic subplot later on.
Yet while Mu-hee and Ho-jin acknowledge their mutual attraction early on, the story stalls their relationship using increasingly implausible and emotionally abstruse narrative devices.

Part of this is down to the show’s desire to play around with genres, which the Hong Sisters do confidently but inconsistently. Mu-hee’s breakthrough role as zombie Do Ra-mi first adds some film-within-a-film horror texture, which bleeds into the story as Mu-hee starts having visions of the character.
This becomes a full-on psychotic break when Mu-hee develops a baffling split personality, giving rise to a wealth of comic asides that at first derail the narrative before the script shoehorns in Mu-hee’s dark family history.
Relying on the kinds of leaps of logic we might expect from daytime soaps, the series fumbles this tonal shift.
The title and concept promise glossy romance and comic misunderstandings, which the first episode largely delivers, but rapid plotting takes precedence over narrative development and, in the end, the series fails to fully explore the potential of the elegant premise that puts everything into motion.

Disappointingly, the show also wastes its best conceit – a struggling actress waking from a coma as a star – by treating it as a comic aside rather than a narrative anchor.
For years, high-profile K-dramas have gone on short jaunts to idyllic overseas locations, such as Crash Landing on You’s trip to Switzerland, but Can This Love Be Translated? spends a particularly long time overseas – in Japan, Canada and Italy – for both personal and professional reasons.
This gives the show a variety of beautiful backdrops, which help to distract from the more outré elements of the plotting.
Can This Love Be Translated? also had a long road to our screens. Originally conceived as a cable series with plans to shoot in China, it was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting the Hong Sisters to focus on Alchemy of Souls instead.

A lengthy casting process followed, with Son Suk-ku and Han So-hee in discussions at different times for the lead roles. Those roles ultimately went to Kim and Go, and they made them their own.
Go, no stranger to hopping through genres, goes through the biggest transformation, confidently portraying the bright and breezy Mu-hee and her unhinged alter ego Ra-mi, even if the character is somewhat contrived on the page.
Meanwhile, Kim returns to the charming form of Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha after a string of thrillers with director Park Hoon-jung – the big-screen outing The Childe and the miniseries The Tyrant.
The Hong Sisters have once again delivered a dynamic genre cocktail that sashays confidently through styles and countries. It is just a shame that some of its excess comes at the expense of its central romance.
Can This Love Be Translated? is streaming on Netflix.


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Kim Seon-ho (left) as Joo Ho-jin and Go Youn-jung as Cha Mu-hee in a still from “Can This Love Be Translated?” Photo: No Ju-han/Netflix

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Kim Seon-ho and Go Youn-jung star in this globetrotting Korean drama that mixes genres at the expense of the core plot


Kim Seon-ho and Go Youn-jung star in this globetrotting Korean drama that mixes genres at the expense of the core plot.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Kim Seon-ho and Go Youn-jung star in this globetrotting Korean drama that mixes genres at the expense of the core plot

Kim Seon-ho and Go Youn-jung star in this globetrotting Korean drama that mixes genres at the expense of the core plot