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Two decades after the crossover success of a series of edgy movies that established Korean cinema as among the most exciting in the world, the industry is now best known for saccharine serial dramas and algorithmic pop music that have propelled certain people to icon status across the world. The coming together of two such stars — the television actor Park Seo-joon and the K-pop sensation Lee Ji-eun, better known as IU — in the new Netflix film Dream feels about as important as the return of Jaya Bachchan and Dharmendra in this week’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani. The jury’s still out on Karan Johar’s film, but sadly, Dream doesn’t live up to the hype around it.
Ostensibly a feel-good drama that follows the basic structure of sports movies so closely that you might be fooled into believing that it was written by The Entity from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Dream strives hard to contrive scenarios designed to pull at the audience’s heartstrings. But it does this with all the elegance of Eric Cantona on a hot summer day at Old Trafford.
So-min isn’t one to sugarcoat things, and she tells Hong-dae quite plainly that she wants to highlight the sad backstories of the homeless characters to manipulate her audiences into caring about them. What she’s making isn’t a sports documentary, but a reality show. As it turns out, she may as well have been directing Dream, as well. Hong-dae, at least initially, is both indifferent towards the whole exercise, and mildly annoyed at being made to ‘perform’ for the camera. It’s added humiliation for him, and he’s barely been able to deal with regularly being recognised as the guy who poked a journalist in the eye.
But somewhat surprisingly, considering the star-power of the two leads, Dream is very much an ensemble piece. In the tradition of films such as Jhund, Gridiron Gang, The Longest Yard and also Lagaan, the movie picks a handful of characters — actually just three, the bare minimum — and gives them one of those Indian Idol-style backstories that make could you feel terrible if you complain about them too loudly. One of these characters was a former CEO who drank his wealth and family away; another is a loveable middle-aged man who is on the brink of losing his daughter to his ex-wife.
These plot lines are only marginally interesting, primarily because there isn’t a single moment in Dream that you don’t see coming a mile away. There’s a difference between embracing tropes and becoming enslaved to them, and unfortunately for us all, director Lee Byeong-heon doesn’t seem to understand this.
His movie isn’t merely manipulative, but it’s also unforgivably boring. There’s no reason, for instance, that it needed to be over two hours long. It’s going through the motions as it is, it could’ve just gone through them quicker. A full 30 minutes at the end are devoted to a match between the Koreans and the Germans, which demands leaps of faith that the movie simply hasn’t earned.
There’s a sense that they’re trying to tap into the same underdog energy that made Next Goal Wins — the fabulous documentary about the American Samoa football team, and not Taika Waititi’s upcoming feature adaptation — a masterpiece, but for that, we needed to watch these characters simply exist, and not function as thinly-written objects. Noble intentions, as Nitesh Tiwari would now know better than anybody else right now, can only get you so far.
Dream
Director – Lee Byeong-heon
Cast – Park Seo-joon, Lee Ji-eun
Rating – 2/5
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