Ha Ji-won in Damo

DAMO
Ha Ji-won's work first impressed me when I was just beginning to research the phenomenal pan-Asian popularity of Korean TV "doramas," the lengthy telanovella-style miniseries that, far more than K Pop CDs of even feature films, had touched off the so-called Korean Wave, a paradigm-shifting vogue for South Korean filmed entertainment that caught on in the late 1990s from Beijing to Manila. (I wrote about it here first.) TV shows on DVD are at least as big over there as they are here, and I made a lucky first selection in one of the biggest hits of the 2007-2008 season, Jumong, a historical epic of dynastic intrigue circa 100 B.C. that feels like a more lush and romantic martial-arts version of Rome or I, Claudius. (There will be more on this addictive super-production in a future column.) From there I decided to track back to the pioneering wuxia-flavored period crime series Damo: The Undercover Lady Detective (2003), which was cited on several fan sites as the huge hit that has shifted the audience's attention from soapy contemporary tales to ambitious period reconstructions such as Jumong and Dae Jang Guem.

The relative wealth of the Korean entertainment industry, as compared with the rest of Asia, undoubtedly helps here. It makes the construction of entire period villages possible and enables relatively slow and painstaking production processes. It gives screenwriters time to polish their dialogue and to build extra twists and turns into their plots. And it gives talented actors room to breath. The most important contribution to the effectiveness of Damo, by far, is Ha Ji-won's high-strung vibrancy in the title role. The character wins us over because in spite of all the indignities she suffers, she always keeps her chin up. Abandoned as a child, relegated as an orphan to a servant class barely one step up from outright slavery, but raised as an equal by a devoted adoptive brother in a world in which women who are not submissive get slapped down; trained in martial arts and encouraged to exercise her talents for detection while officially working as the police station's seen-but-not-heard tea servant — the role on paper sounds like an impossible mixture of contradictory elements, of vulnerability and power. But Ha Ji-won seems to have no trouble singing two notes at once, like a Tuvan throat singer. While not a drop-dead glamour puss (nose a little too long, eyes a little too small) she is captivating in a way that makes the usual criteria of hotness seem even more trivial than usual.

One problem that always needs to be confronted with these TV dramas is how to acquire them. Jumong runs to 80 episodes divided into four boxed sets, each of which will set you back almost $100. The DVD boxed set of Damo, from YA Entertainment, is pricey, too, but impeccably produced, and, in the absence of video, its Special Features includes a 28-page English-language Reference Guide that annotates the action episode-by-episode with definitions and notes on social customs. The Guide is one of the amenities you'll miss if you decide to rent from online outfits such as eHit or TigerCinema. Unless you're rolling in it there is no completely satisfactory option.

Duelist was an obvious successor to Damo because it is nominally a feature-film remake of the TV show — based on the same popular novel, with Ha as the only holdover from the tube version. In practice, Duelist is a series of visual curlicues only glancingly based on a few of the story's themes. Most of the period's social textures and their seismic effects on the conflicted characters have been dropped to make room for music-video-style virtuoso set pieces, and the Damo character has been reconfigured as a two-fisted anachronism, a pushy lower-to-middle-class career cop with an engaging sneer.