Im Kkeok Jung (1996)

Not your average historical drama (no spoilers but maybe cw)

I do love sageuks. I hardly watch anything else. But I have this problem, see: there is a lot of classism. Their stories are always about princes and princesses and yangbans, and even if the main character is of a lower status they are almost always sure to be a child of a noble family that has been wrongly accused of treason etc etc etc. The actual low-status characters are often caricatures and comic relief. I find this problematic.

So dramas like Im Kkong Jung are a huge breath of fresh air to me.
This is as far from the silk-clothed, baby-faced, elegant jeune premiers as you can get. It's dusty, muddy, raw. There's straw and rags and unkempt hair and unwashed faces and people being horrible to each other. In fact, I don't think there's a worse drama to be a woman in, than this one (*).
The music is heavily based on Korean folk music, with folk singer Jang Sah Ik among others. It is very appropriate and enhances the watching experience.
... which is hard. I won't lie, this is at times a tough watch. Not only the material world is depicted with all its flaws and blemishes, but the humans in it as well. The heroes of this epic are horrible people. One of them literally murders babies. We certainly don't get a glamourized version of poverty. On the contrary, we get a naturalistic depiction of it.
A special mention to the direction. I adored the camera work. The angles, the movements, it was beautifully filmed.

I think I'll watch parts of it again. I can't watch all of it, mainly because of *see asterisk above. So much assault, rape, abuse, oh and that's just from the "good guys".

In short: if you want love stories with princes, this is not the one. If you want a good historical drama that is all about the Korean people who populated the history outside the palace and the fancy villas of the aristocracy, give this a go.

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A surprise

We almost never see a historical drama led by the commoners. This drama came out in 1996 but it has such a fresh and interesting take on the entire genre to this very day! However, it's not perfect, its biggest problem is that it's bloated with too many side stories carried by less interesting characters which delayed getting to good parts. The drama didn't fully focus on Im Kkeok Jung until the 2nd half. The set design was decent for 1996. The set was reasonably lit at night while taking into consideration they used to use candles instead of high beam studio lights back then!

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