“Queen of Tears” contains all the typical hallmarks of a romance K-drama: a suspenseful love triangle, hospital scenes, high-status characters with tortured pasts and a catchy, immersive soundtrack that plays at all the right moments. But there is one aspect that sets this drama apart. Instead of internally shouting at our leads to confess their feelings for each other and have their first kiss already, we are rooting for a couple to rediscover and redefine what it means to love.
Half of all marriages result in divorce. This sobering yet false statistic is repeatedly considered an accepted fact of life as we watch a married couple of three-plus years on the brink of crisis. Marriage is now associated with an eventual parting, and rather than outright refuting this pessimistic myth, “Queen of Tears” is not afraid of playing with this idea to salvage what looks like an irreparable relationship.
Baek Hyun-Woo (Kim Soo-Hyun, “It’s Okay to Not be Okay”), a boy from a rural farm who later studies law at Seoul National University, and Hong Hae-In (Kim Ji-Won, “Descendants of the Sun”), the girl who is to inherit one of Korea’s largest conglomerates, have the “wedding of the century,” as the media puts it. The event was a fateful union of two souls from disparate worlds: One had only known the slow living of village life surrounded by honest and hardworking laborers while the other had grown up in quick-paced corporate city life surrounded by scheming business elite. What follows their union should have been a fairytale dream come true, but as Hyun-Woo and Hae-In acclimate to their newly post-wed lives, they find this couldn’t be further from the truth.
After three years of hell, and Hyun-Woo wants out. Left feeling nothing but miserable living with and working alongside his now-estranged wife’s morally corrupt family (one akin to that of “Crazy Rich Asians”), he has no choice but to divorce her. That is until he is faced with the news that his wife has been diagnosed with a rare type of brain tumor; she is set to die in just a few months.
Baek Hyun-Woo is charted for a new mission now. After learning of Hae-In’s condition, he retracts his wish to separate and instead works to woo his wife’s love back so that she will change her will before she dies. After all, it would be great to escape this marriage permanently unscathed and obscenely rich. Twisted much? Not exactly. By engaging in several over-the-top fake acts of fondness, he finds himself increasingly caring and protective toward Hae-In with each passing episode. If this were any other drama, we’d hope the flirty male lead would finally muster up the courage to express his undying love with a dramatic gesture. In this case, though, we are eagerly waiting for Hyun-Woo’s realization that his cheesy acts of service are not for a fortune anymore, but rather out of love for the cold, calculating woman he despised for the past several years. Likewise, we are sitting at the edge of our seats wondering when Hae-In will be brave and vulnerable enough to reciprocate this genuine affection.
Some may believe that knowing the couple’s extensive backstory makes the stereotypically expected romance unsatisfying because these two were once deeply infatuated with one other. We know this is a show about a marriage rescuing itself, of two individuals fighting each other to eventually overcome the odds together. Strangely enough, however, something is endearing about watching dulled-out passion gradually revive into something more beautiful and complex. Rather than taking away from the show’s intrigue, the couple’s narrative arc adds dimension to their first kiss on screen, their hugs of comfort in the pouring rain and their confrontations with “family” members who detest this ill-matched relationship. Indeed, we see here that resurrecting love after having it all is just as much a struggle as searching for it.
One can only hope that this distanced couple can once again recreate those oh-so-charmingly romantic montages from their initial stages of puppy love. Each episode sends Hyun-Woo’s and Hae-In’s relationship on an unpredictable roller coaster ride. At the time of writing, only four episodes have been released, leaving much of their story to the anticipation and speculation of the audience.
We’ve seen exes get back together, enemies-to-lovers, pretend-dating transformed into real relationships and long-lost loves finding their way back to each other. What about a combination of these well-loved tropes in the context of a post-marriage happy-never-after? “Queen of Tears” refreshingly details how to rekindle that dying spark of intimacy by starting at what other dramas would’ve regarded as the customary “happily ever after.” And who knows? Maybe that gloomy divorce statistic will be nothing but a forgotten percentage once this show is finished.
Daily Arts Writer Michelle Wu can be reached at michewu@umich.edu.