Bullet Point Review: Still 17
Published in
6 min readMay 26, 2020
- 2020 is a horrible year. I am without a job, stuck in lockdown, away from my family for the last two months and while I am grateful for a roof over my head, and three hot square meals a day, it doesn’t curb the anxiety I feel day in and day out in the face of an utterly uncertain future. So, all I ask is for a good cheerful rom-com I can find solace in for a few hours of the day and after the unexciting What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim, I was even more desperate for some fluff. But like they say, higher the expectation, larger the disappointment and I wound up with another humdrum of a romantic comedy by the name of Still 17 (also translated as Thirty But Seventeen).
- Still 17 has a promising premise but sadly that’s all it remains as — a premise, an outline of a story that is never fully sketched out. The drama follows Woo Seo Ri (Shin Hye Sun), a budding violinist, who after an untimely accident goes into a coma for thirteen years, waking up in the present day as a thirty-year-old. Now, with an older body and missing relatives, Seo Ri is all alone in a world that is as good as new to her and is forced to confront the harsh reality that she has lost her youth, her dreams, her family and her home. The initial episodes are well set up for the tragedy to occur, where we witness Seo Ri’s love for classical music and her ambitions to study in Germany. So, when the accident occurs, it is painful to watch a young life filled with such dedication and hope snatched away so brutally. Most dramas do have a character like Seo Ri, who have lost their youth to relentlessly pursuing education or paying back debts or overworking to achieve that desired position in the company, but these characters at least get to confront these problems and make some sort of a decision, but for Seo Ri, that right too was taken away. Dramabeans described this drama as a modern-day Sleeping Beauty, but instead of being awoken by a kiss, Seo Ri is woken up by music. Considering how much she lives and breathes music, it makes sense that music is the one that breathes life back into her. Unfortunately, with all this strong setup, the remainder of the drama remains a fairytale.
Now, I am all for suspension of belief (to a certain extent) when watching dramas, but Seo Ri just gets everything handed over to her. In the beginning scenes, we watch her in pain during her rehabilitation treatment, and then in confusion, as she tries to make sense of the city that has massively changed. There are a few feeble attempts at a job but after that, it’s a smooth sail, too smooth in fact. Seo Ri soon gets to a place to stay (I didn’t mind this as much. I have seen more convoluted ways of getting the leads to stay under one roof), a full-time job, with no experience in the field whatsoever (she isn’t a high school graduate as well), and is immediately chosen to play at a music festival, when discovered by her professor. Not once did she have to prove herself, beg someone, or make some sort of an effort to land these jobs. It’s all due to her love for music, her innocence, her naiveté. We also keep hearing about Seo Ri wanting to find her uncle and aunt, but we never see any tangible attempt from her. There is a small bit where she asks around, talks to the police, and puts up posters but soon, it is conveniently forgotten about. Ultimately it is Gong Woo Jin (Yang Se Jong) who connects the dots and finds them. Seo Ri then comes across as a passive character, with an army of ever so helpful people ready to help her. Hence, it becomes difficult to buy her struggle as a seventeen-year-old trying to fit in as a thirty-year-old.
- As much as I love Shin Hye Sun, her interpretation (or the director’s) of a seventeen-year-old, felt more like seven year old. Seo Ri comes across as a puppy, squealing with joy even at the most mundane things and is shy and embarrassed most times. In a shorter runtime, I wouldn’t have minded this but for a whole sixteen hours, all this goodness was grating, to say the least.
- The problem lies in the fact that neither is the drama a heartwarming tale nor is it an exaggerated comedy with wild energy and quirky characters. Still 17 prefers to walk the middle terrain, which makes the drama quite banal. Dramas like Touch Your Heart, The Beauty Inside, Her Private Life, A Poem A Day, also don’t follow a strict plotline per se, at least in the first half, which is comprised of just day to day shenanigans of the characters. However, the characters and the dynamic between them were lively and entertaining, while here Seo Ri seems to be high on sugar, and Woo Jin is just plain boring, and the interactions between them are just about passable. In contrast, the supporting characters fare much better. Ahn Hyo Seop as Yoo Chan brings exuberance to the drama, along with his friends Deok Soo and Hae Bum (Jo Hyun Sik & Lee Do Hyun), who were all pretty funny, and rightly acting like teenagers — funny, innocent but not blatantly dumb. Yoo Chan’s subplot of rowing was executed far better than the main plotline of Seo Ri and her violin. Throughout the show, we witness Yoo Chan’s single-minded dedication towards his training and thereby it becomes easier to buy his superior strength and skills, which led him to win a gold medal even with a broken ankle. Compare this to Seo Ri, who is also (mentally) a teenager but we don’t see her practicing with her violin as much, which then could have led to a more believable reason as to why her professor hires her in a blink of the eye.
Seo Ri’s rival Kim Tae Rin (Wang Ji Won) also had an interesting subplot, as someone who after achieving massive success is still unable to let go of her jealousy. Seo Ri’s high school friend Kim Hyeong Tae (Yoon Sun Woo), who also conveniently disappears after the initial episodes, would have made a perfect rival to Woo Jin, as he was the one waiting patiently by Seo Ri’s side all these years, while Woo Jin happened to meet her by coincidence, and that friction could have been mined for some great tension. - As you move further into the show, the whole waking-up-from-the-coma scenario seems redundant, as the plot falls into the same childhood lovers living/working with each other and not knowing it scenario. Still 17 doesn’t provide any insight into the differences of being a girl and a woman — the responsibilities, expectations, and how society's views change when a girl chases her dream when she is seventeen and a woman when she is thirty. I am not asking for a Mariana trench level deep insight, but a few pointers wouldn’t hurt. I really like Seo Ri's conversation with Kang Hee Soo (Jung Eugene), where Seo Ri asks her what it means to be an adult. It’s a type of question that a teenager would ask, and Hee Soo replies that she doesn’t know what she is doing half the time and kind of just going with the flow. This was a nice perspective, especially coming from a woman who runs her own design studio but it’s the only moment in the midst of a series of uneventful proceedings.
