“Coffee Prince,” despite its odd premise, is a delightful character-driven gender-bender.
The heroine (center) may not be as beautiful as Waffle Sun-ki (on the left), but she’s adorable anyway.
If you’re looking for a guilty pleasure romance, you’ll get sucked into binge-watching CP! If you’re only comfortable with American rules of story-telling, you’ll be frustrated, however. Coffee Prince follows K-drama rules: the main characters might be doing slapstick comedy one moment, and having a touching emotional crisis the next. I found these tone shifts jarring when I first started watching Asian stuff.
Sometimes the show is very funny: in early episodes, the self-absorbed hero is pure comedy, with his preening and posing, and the hard-working heroine has equally funny moments as a tae kwondo master and a milk delivery girl who has long conversations with the dogs on the milk route. Later, the “boys love” story arc has all the melodrama, tension and angst of a shonen ai manga. And the final arc is a sweet romance of a kind I haven’t seen in the US in a long time. It’s corny as heck, but in such a good way.
The corniness works partly because the romance is mixed with humor, but also because I’m rooting for the main characters despite their human flaws. All four leading actors pull off the trick of making you care about them, even if you know you would avoid them in real life. (I even found myself respecting the prickly artist Yoo-Joo.) The chemistry is great between the two leads—in fact, there’s good chemistry between everyone in the two overlapping love triangles that dominate much of the story.
The likable characters make it easy to suspend disbelief and accept the heroine’s masquerade. She’s pretty convincing as a skinny young gay guy, while still being cute and girlish when she’s off work. The key elements of her transformation are unflattering clothes and an unsmiling face, which are surprisingly effective. In her simple disguise, she sometimes reminds me of a female friend of mine who passed for male for years (before becoming male). I was relieved that the gender-bender plot doesn’t mock anyone. Instead, it respects the variety of ways that women and men can look and act, while pointing out the effort required to act “gender appropriate.”
Now, a question that’s bugging me: Should we feel guilty for watching a guilty pleasure like CP instead of the latest taut, tense, dramatic masterpiece from HBO?
I say, No! The best comedies say as much about human nature as the best dramas. CP gets in a few zingers. Even during the gender-bender story arc, the conflicts are rooted in the characters’ anxieties, not simply in mistaken identities.
CP serves up the biggest anxieties of the twenty-first century: gender (who are you allowed to love?) and equality (can women be in love with men and still succeed at work?). The gender confusion is just one part of a bigger issue the characters are dealing with: who the heck is in charge in this relationship? And how do I get the upper hand, quick? In fact, even the tension between the main characters around their economic class differences is just an element of this classic romantic power struggle.
I can’t decide if I like the solutions the characters came up with, but I enjoyed watching them look for answers. CP asks the right questions.
Full cast information here at Drama Wiki and at Asian Wiki.
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