What a viewSong Kang stars as ‘symbol of seductive beauty’ in Netflix K-romance Nevertheless
- The heartthrob actor takes centre stage opposite co-star Han So-hee in will-they-won’t-they college romp
- In Time, a gritty three-part drama from BBC First, Sean Bean ditches his hard man image to play a downtrodden teacher turned prisoner
Unless Korean tastes are about to suffer a seismic shock, then heartthrob Song Kang is unlikely to be out of work any time soon.
A familiar face from several recent romance-dramas, Song now stars as lead head-turner Park Jae-eon in Nevertheless (Netflix, series one now showing), a love-conquers-all saga that starts in unusual surroundings. These are the clay- and paint-splattered workshops of a university sculpture course, in which the students, when not hammering, welding, moulding and carving, or shrinking from their bitchy, aggressive professor, are dreaming about girlfriends, boyfriends, what’s for lunch and what drinking game they should play next: normal student behaviour, I suppose.
Curiously, in these enlightened times, they are also a bunch of dedicated smokers – although that could be down to product placement.
Scrubbed to the point of having a translucent glow, Jae-eon, because he isn’t brash and doesn’t take advantage of the girls swooning in his very presence, is considered by some to be just a big tease. The paralysing shyness of Yu Na-bi (Han So-hee), however, allied to her naivety in emotional affairs, appeals to Jae-eon, who is really just a simple lad at heart. Or is he?
Na-bi drags out the will-they-won’t-they question as long as possible (when we know they will), but not just through diffidence or because she wants to gaze into his eyes in slow motion. She is suspicious of this “symbol of seductive beauty”, as one student dismisses him, partly because of his obsession with butterflies – and not just those in young lovers’ stomachs.
This is where Nevertheless cleverly does whatever the Korean is for cocking a snook at public opinion. Last year, Han suffered a backlash from the righteously indignant for having tattoos, which she has since had removed (no doubt painfully). Here, Na-bi sports what looks like a small item of body art – rendered in nothing more than marker pen. Jae-eon, meanwhile, prominently displays what purports to be the real thing.