There were two things in Dew which left me unsure what to make of it, enough that I didn't give it a rating the first time I saw it but decided to watch Bungee Jumping of Their Own, the So Korean film it remakes. I finally got around to that a month ago. These are some thoughts.
Content warnings for Bungee Jumping: excessive violence against an object, violence against a person, marital rape, misogyny, homophobia.
The central male lead is one red flag after another with significant anger management issues. This is what I wrote about it then (significant spoilers)
The way he beats the shit out of his umbrella, big red flag. Oh let's make a joke out of it and laugh it off and wasn't it romantic the way she waited in the rain for him.
Marital rape. To prove that he's a man.
Yeah, it showed that he was all kinds of upset, but the caning he gave the kid. Super yikes.
And it's all so romantic he's worth dying for. %(*$£ to that and the male-gaze misogyny and homophobia it rode in on.
Acting was good. They made drama out of a man who can't control his emotions. Yippee.
The acting was good but I cannot recommend the SK original. At all. If you're at all unsure about Dew, stay away from Bungee Jumping of Their Own.
Also, it didn't feel like a soul mates movie, more like a red flag obsession for the woman he lost. Why she was so into him she gave up her next life as well is a mystery to me. It's not her story at all. Dew is far more equal in that regard.
The aspects of the Thai remake which some commenters and reviewers on MDL struggle with reflect the original.
Dew reverses genders of two of the main roles from Bungee (both Dew and Dew's reincarnation). This lets the Thai remake take a very strong, and thoroughly melodramatic, stance against homophobia and the pain which comes from it. It's a compelling, if heart-wrenchingly difficult story, especially with the emotion young Ohm and Nont bring. But it's always clear that homophobia is the villain.
Bungee is just homophobic. Seriously, depressingly homophobic. It doesn't exactly like women either, except as objects.
Along with the reincarnation gender switch between the two halves of each movie, the age gap is part of the original and a significant enough part of it any remake has to include it. If the characters in Bungee were weirded out by the age difference, I missed that. The homophobia, because the reincarnation was a boy, was impossible to miss. The teacher was really flipped out by idea of loving a man, students were merciless in their taunting, the reincarnated boy was miserable (and didn't have much agency, perhaps because he was the young woman of the first half - misogyny and homophobia so often being linked). And my word, the way he punished the young man for it. Horrible, horrible, horrible. A voice over at the end has the two saying they'll keep trying again if they're both reborn as girls.... Like the only thing worse than being gay is being gay and women. But laugh like it's a joke. I'll stop now before I start swearing again.
When I saw Dew the first time, I'd only seen Thai series + a few movies and didn't understand melodrama or much about the way Thais approach emotions like grief in their films. The emotions in Dew are immense and often difficult; my western brain attached some of that upset to the twists in the plot rather than letting them stay where they belonged. I also let myself be swayed by critical comments and reviews. Returning to it 17 months, it's clear that the age gap is a problem for the characters (also it's not pedophilia, he's still gay), their gender difference isn't the issue (the age difference is) or anything to be critical of (Phob is still gay and reincarnated Dew still likes boys) and it's very much a story of soul mates, loss and, let's call it hope. Not getting caught up in MDL upset over those matters lets the magnificence of this story-telling shine through. Everyone involved did so well with it.
The filmmakers took a deeply flawed original, reversed its homophobia and in doing so fixed another of the original's flaws. Others they chose not to repeat. It is a difficult movie to get through with the immensity of its emotions, even though they temper it with lighter moments and surround Phop's grief with gentle warmth in that very characteristic Thai way. I'm glad I came back to it so I could understand and appreciate it more fully, but I don't know if I can put myself through it again. This may be the best movie I'll let remain just in memory.
