Oh My Venus

1999. Daegu.

A busload of high school students listen to a radio show as the DJ reads a letter submitted by a lovestruck teenage boy who, along with all the boys in town, is infatuated with a girl named Kang Joo-eun. That’s the girl who’s featured in a magazine article naming her the winner of a “prettiest face contest,” and in her profile she has listed “using Seoul speech” as her goal for the future.

Then the bus pulls up to the next stop, and all the boys go wild in anticipation as that very girl steps onto the bus. She’s KANG JOO-EUN , nicknamed the Venus of Daegu, and she inspires adoration and envy in equal measure.

At school, during gym class weigh-in, the girls exclaim at Joo-eun’s unrealistically perfect proportions. What’s the point of studying when life is so unfair?

Joo-eun is called out of class to clean up the graffiti left by her admirers, proclaiming their love for her. Then on her way home after school, she sees a group of boys sneaking cigarettes in a side street and warns them to cut it out. They aren’t intimidated by her, but a third student joins them wearing a Korea Swimming tracksuit and leads the others off, telling Joo-eun not to get too hot-headed and melt her ice cream

As the boys walk away, Joo-eun’s approached by a beauty salon owner who gives her the pitch to let her turn Joo-eun into Miss Korea. She’s not at all interested, turning the offer down flat—she’s got other plans in mind for her future.

Her goal is to become a lawyer, and she heads to the library to study—and where a whole other set of adoring admirers is on hand to offer up all sorts of study help. They’re interrupted by someone reminding them of the silence rule—it’s the swimmer again, and he motions Joo-eun to meet him on the roof.

The swimmer is IM WOO-SHIK, and he exudes confidence as he tells her who he is and waits for her to recognize him. She doesn’t, and his bravado takes a hit as he tells her he’s totally famous, he’s in the newspapers, he’s a national athlete and he just competed in the junior world championships! Joo-eun apologizes sarcastically, asking if she should have brought him flowers.

His confidence shaken, Woo-shik blurts that he’s from Seoul, and her goal was to learn Seoul speech, and he can teach her. He says her dimples are pretty, which makes her touch her cheek shyly, and then he draws near and takes his newly won gold medal and hangs it around her neck. He says a little nervously that he can only say this once, because a man only has one first love.

“From today on, you’re my first love,” he tells her. Joo-eun smiles bashfully, and when he says Seoul speech is tough to learn, she counters that she can do whatever she puts her mind to. They smile adorably at each other, and then, the years zoom by, landing us in…

2014, Seoul.

We meet Joo-eun as an attorney in a big corporate law firm, taking a meeting with a new client who turns heads as she struts into the office. The client’s skintight dress and sexy appearance makes Joo-eun fidget self-consciously—because Joo-eun is now much heavier than she once was, and she tugs at her own clothes uncomfortably.

It’s a blow to her ego to have the sexy client see the couple photos of her old self with Woo-shik and ask who that (pretty) woman is. Joo-eun tells us that Woo-shik was her first love and has been her boyfriend for the past fifteen years.

As for the case in question, the client has been entangled in an adultery case—she’s the Other Woman, and the wife is suing her. So she plans to countersue, shamelessly proclaiming her innocence (she’s not innocent) and ordering Joo-eun to go after the wife for slander, defamation, invasion of privacy, whatever she can.

Joo-eun finds the case distasteful and unfair, but is ordered by her boss (who’s friends with the cheating husband) to do her job and serve the client. She apparently has a history of arguing for justice and fairness, to no avail. She can’t quit either, as her secretary reminds her she still has 14 months of school loan repayments to make.

Her temperament has gotten her in trouble before, and a flashback shows us that only a couple years ago, she’d had her desk moved into an open corridor in retaliation, her boss adding smugly that she’s welcome to leave and set up her own practice.

Still in 2014, we move to Los Angeles, where the newest Hollywood gossip involves a troublemaker star, Anna Sue, who’s embroiled in a scandal with famous star trainer John Kim. Despite nobody knowing what John Kim looks like, he was the star of a The Stella Show, one of those dramatic transformation shows akin to The Swan or Extreme Makeover.

The woman featured was described as in a dark place before John Kim turned her life around, and somehow her dramatic beautification is touted as “sen[ding] a hopeful message to women all over the world.” (Uh, that people love you when you’re pretty again?)

In any place, the latest scandal pairs John Kim with Anna Sue. And as this news plays on TV, we see him working out solo in a state-of-the-art gym.

He doesn’t show much reaction to the report, but ignores repeated calls from Anna Sue. On the upside, he does bathe, which we all get to enjoy for a nice minute.

Back to Joo-eun, who addresses the obvious question head-on: Why hasn’t she tried dieting?

As she explains, she’s tried every diet under the sun, from cabbage to tofu to trendy celebrity secret tips. She yo-yo’d constantly, and the frequent overworking didn’t help.

Tonight, Joo-eun finally wraps up her work after a long night and heads out to meet Woo-shik for their fifteenth-year anniversary. She thinks back to their high school days, when he’d presented her with roses and couple rings on the same library rooftop where he’d first confessed, and they’d counted that as their first day as a couple.

Joo-eun still wears that ring (albeit on her pinky finger now) and heads over with an excited heart, happily anticipating his proposal. Her best friend HYUN-WOO expects it too, grumbling that he’d better have prepared a monster diamond after making her wait so long.

Joo-eun primps in the restaurant bathroom, but drops her lipstick down a crevice in the sink. A tall, sophisticated woman offers her lipstick to Joo-eun, and Joo-eun accepts while casting an envious look at the woman’s figure. “Black is a color that makes you look slimmer,” Joo-eun thinks. “But it’s not a color that makes you slimmer. Dammit.”

She finds Woo-shik at a table, and he gives her an offhand hello when she arrives. But he knows the importance of the event and has prepared a whole lavish spread, with wine and cake and candles. He toasts, saying, “Fifteen years… I was thankful.” Somehow that doesn’t sound promising.

Woo-shik drives her home afterward, and she looks in anticipation at the small box he hands her… which contains his half of the couple rings he’d bought all those years ago. “That is my heart,” he says. “Please take it.”

She doesn’t understand, and all he can do is apologize. She asks what the flowers are for, and he says he felt like too much of a jerk otherwise, which doesn’t alleviate her hurt. He says he just wanted to give her the anniversary and starts to break up, but she cuts him off and says she understands what he means by returning the ring. But she’s too tired to do this tonight, to which he tries to argue, wanting to get it out and over with.

And the story is enough..

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