Navillera

March 22, 2021

Shim Deok-chul (Park In-hwan), 70, walks into a ballet studio and asks for lessons. The ballet teacher refers him to Lee Chae-rok (Song Kang), 23, who needs the income. Neither expects this to become important.

March 23, 2021

The 47-year age gap between student and teacher is the drama's formal subject. How they bridge it — through the shared language of physical training — is its emotional one.

March 29, 2021

Deok-chul's ordinary life in the Nowon neighbourhood — his wife, his retired routine, his quiet — is shown as the world he is quietly departing by learning ballet.

March 30, 2021

Chae-rok's own story — his financial precarity, his injured knee, his question of whether to continue — runs parallel to Deok-chul's beginning.

April 5, 2021

Deok-chul's progress is slow. His body is seventy years old. His determination is absolute. The drama's training montages are more moving than they have any right to be.

April 6, 2021

Deok-chul's family — his wife, his children — react to the ballet lessons with varying degrees of discomfort. The drama does not make them villains.

April 12, 2021

Chae-rok decides to continue dancing. His relationship with Deok-chul is part of why.

April 13, 2021

A visit to the Seoul Arts Centre in Seocho — Chae-rok showing Deok-chul what professional ballet looks like. The gap between where Deok-chul is and what he is learning toward.

April 19, 2021

Deok-chul explains to Chae-rok what ballet means to him — why he started now, at seventy, when everything would tell him not to.

April 20, 2021

Deok-chul can do things he could not do in Episode 1. The drama earns this through ten episodes of unglamorous, consistent work.

April 26, 2021

Deok-chul receives a health diagnosis that complicates the drama's resolution.

April 27, 2021

The finale. Park In-hwan's performance as a 70-year-old man discovering that a dream is still available to him is one of the most genuinely moving things Korean drama produced in 2021.