This review may contain spoilers
This Must Be the Place (To Translate Love)
The premise of Can This Love Be Translated? is undoubtedly appealing.
A drama that plays on linguistic differences, manages to weave Italian into its narrative structure and moves between fascinating international settings such as Canada, Italy, Japan and Korea, it seems to have all the right ingredients to surprise. However, once the initial impact has worn off, the series reveals its limitations: a rather thin narrative, which develops according to familiar patterns and struggles to stand out and really explore the subject matter, getting lost in smoke and mirrors and convoluted musings. Everything remains superficial, proceeding by accumulation and ending in a rambling and inconclusive manner.
And that's a shame, because the set of themes deserved a much more elaborate narrative; telling the story of love, identity and trauma through the filter of linguistic and cultural translation, especially in a meta-cinematic context – albeit reduced to a horrifying case of “dating show” around the world – would in itself be an excellent starting point:
Love, like language, is an imperfect system: Something is always lost in the transition from one heart to another. It is constantly filtered: By the right words, by messages, by unspoken words that must be rephrased so as not to hurt, so as not to lose the other person. The act of translation is not only linguistic, but emotional. The characters try to make themselves “readable”...
It almost seems like a “tragedy of miscommunication”: even though they speak the same language, Ju Ho Jin and Cha Mu Hui do not understand each other, and translators are not needed when the problem is not language, but meaning.
In this game of “emotional translations”, Can This Love Be Translated? introduces an element that is seemingly unrelated and unconventional, but in reality powerful, at least in principle: Do Ra Mi. A character who -initially- functions as the protagonist's alter ego — her lighter, more ironic version, the one who says what she cannot say — but who ultimately reveals herself to be something more trivially introjected.
Not an autonomous presence, but a functional projection that openly “betrays” the narrative construction; initially, the main character’s trauma is introduced with considerable weight (coma, loss of control, scarred childhood) but then it conforms, it is handled as a narrative mechanism, not as a transformative experience; Do Ra-mi - in principle - would be a “valve” that allows the protagonist to say what she does not dare to say, to act on what she cannot process, until the final “explanation” which, unreasonably, overturns everything, bringing it back to a cliché tiredly exploited in the Dramaverse, especially in the golden age; the internalised maternal voice, the one that teaches how to make oneself acceptable, how to survive emotionally, how to love “well”.
However, even this surprise is handled more as a narrative clarification than as a real emotional earthquake; even after the revelation, the conflict does not really intensify. The internalised mother does not suffocate, dominate or ever threaten to take definitive control. She is a tamed ghost, more explanatory than destabilising. In this way, the childhood trauma – which is evoked with great emphasis – never becomes a force capable of irreversibly redefining the protagonist's present. Everything is accepted and overcome with lightness...
Furthermore, from a cinematic point of view, the choice of an “off-screen” solution (... “I'll meet her in Koreatown” ...) to resolve what is, to all intents and purposes, the narrative core of the drama, is absolutely unacceptable and unforgivable!
Unforgivable, like the representation of Italy, once again reduced to a stereotype, to an imaginary concept rather than the real country; For decades, the narrative of the Belpaese, mainly due to Hollywood, has portrayed Italy as a narrative postcard, an open-air museum with its slow pace, almost invisible work, as if we were a nation of slackers, permanent conviviality, and the absurd rituals of coffee, wine and weddings (the whole part about the protagonist's mother's wedding is an anthology of the ridiculous...); and here there is also a touch of irony, where a drama entitled “Can This Love Be Translated?” ends up not really “translating” Italy, but adapting it to a convenient, already familiar language.
A compendium of the most hackneyed narrative clichés of K-drama, ‘CTLBT’ plays on the tried and tested, offering an accessible, elegant and emotionally safe narrative in which it seems that the choice has been made not to make the characters pay a real emotional price. No truly irreversible choices, no net losses. And without loss, the conclusion struggles to feel necessary in a drama that promises complexity but chooses consolation, leaving two doubts that are at least concrete;
The Netflix model focuses on building media hype to capture the “present”, with a young, beautiful, "Instagrammable" lead actress, a beloved actor who never divides opinion – their excellent performances practically single-handedly “save” the drama – and a “clean”, explained, resolved trauma; all set in a beautiful scenario that leads one to think that the whole thing is the result of a major global marketing operation.
"Can This Love Be Translated" is not a creative failure—the series is saved by its craftsmanship and adequate cast—but rather a deliberate choice of narrative safety in a context of global aesthetic ambition. Perhaps for younger generations – or for those who have no memory of the great dramas of the early 2000s or the more radical titles of the 2010s – this series seems mature because it deals with trauma, identity and social issues. But talking about them is not the same as experiencing them, it is simply finding oneself in a comfort zone that works very well at the moment, generates discussion, etc., but which, perhaps in a few years' time, will be remembered as one of those “nice Netflix dramas”.
6 ½
A drama that plays on linguistic differences, manages to weave Italian into its narrative structure and moves between fascinating international settings such as Canada, Italy, Japan and Korea, it seems to have all the right ingredients to surprise. However, once the initial impact has worn off, the series reveals its limitations: a rather thin narrative, which develops according to familiar patterns and struggles to stand out and really explore the subject matter, getting lost in smoke and mirrors and convoluted musings. Everything remains superficial, proceeding by accumulation and ending in a rambling and inconclusive manner.
And that's a shame, because the set of themes deserved a much more elaborate narrative; telling the story of love, identity and trauma through the filter of linguistic and cultural translation, especially in a meta-cinematic context – albeit reduced to a horrifying case of “dating show” around the world – would in itself be an excellent starting point:
Love, like language, is an imperfect system: Something is always lost in the transition from one heart to another. It is constantly filtered: By the right words, by messages, by unspoken words that must be rephrased so as not to hurt, so as not to lose the other person. The act of translation is not only linguistic, but emotional. The characters try to make themselves “readable”...
It almost seems like a “tragedy of miscommunication”: even though they speak the same language, Ju Ho Jin and Cha Mu Hui do not understand each other, and translators are not needed when the problem is not language, but meaning.
In this game of “emotional translations”, Can This Love Be Translated? introduces an element that is seemingly unrelated and unconventional, but in reality powerful, at least in principle: Do Ra Mi. A character who -initially- functions as the protagonist's alter ego — her lighter, more ironic version, the one who says what she cannot say — but who ultimately reveals herself to be something more trivially introjected.
Not an autonomous presence, but a functional projection that openly “betrays” the narrative construction; initially, the main character’s trauma is introduced with considerable weight (coma, loss of control, scarred childhood) but then it conforms, it is handled as a narrative mechanism, not as a transformative experience; Do Ra-mi - in principle - would be a “valve” that allows the protagonist to say what she does not dare to say, to act on what she cannot process, until the final “explanation” which, unreasonably, overturns everything, bringing it back to a cliché tiredly exploited in the Dramaverse, especially in the golden age; the internalised maternal voice, the one that teaches how to make oneself acceptable, how to survive emotionally, how to love “well”.
However, even this surprise is handled more as a narrative clarification than as a real emotional earthquake; even after the revelation, the conflict does not really intensify. The internalised mother does not suffocate, dominate or ever threaten to take definitive control. She is a tamed ghost, more explanatory than destabilising. In this way, the childhood trauma – which is evoked with great emphasis – never becomes a force capable of irreversibly redefining the protagonist's present. Everything is accepted and overcome with lightness...
Furthermore, from a cinematic point of view, the choice of an “off-screen” solution (... “I'll meet her in Koreatown” ...) to resolve what is, to all intents and purposes, the narrative core of the drama, is absolutely unacceptable and unforgivable!
Unforgivable, like the representation of Italy, once again reduced to a stereotype, to an imaginary concept rather than the real country; For decades, the narrative of the Belpaese, mainly due to Hollywood, has portrayed Italy as a narrative postcard, an open-air museum with its slow pace, almost invisible work, as if we were a nation of slackers, permanent conviviality, and the absurd rituals of coffee, wine and weddings (the whole part about the protagonist's mother's wedding is an anthology of the ridiculous...); and here there is also a touch of irony, where a drama entitled “Can This Love Be Translated?” ends up not really “translating” Italy, but adapting it to a convenient, already familiar language.
A compendium of the most hackneyed narrative clichés of K-drama, ‘CTLBT’ plays on the tried and tested, offering an accessible, elegant and emotionally safe narrative in which it seems that the choice has been made not to make the characters pay a real emotional price. No truly irreversible choices, no net losses. And without loss, the conclusion struggles to feel necessary in a drama that promises complexity but chooses consolation, leaving two doubts that are at least concrete;
The Netflix model focuses on building media hype to capture the “present”, with a young, beautiful, "Instagrammable" lead actress, a beloved actor who never divides opinion – their excellent performances practically single-handedly “save” the drama – and a “clean”, explained, resolved trauma; all set in a beautiful scenario that leads one to think that the whole thing is the result of a major global marketing operation.
"Can This Love Be Translated" is not a creative failure—the series is saved by its craftsmanship and adequate cast—but rather a deliberate choice of narrative safety in a context of global aesthetic ambition. Perhaps for younger generations – or for those who have no memory of the great dramas of the early 2000s or the more radical titles of the 2010s – this series seems mature because it deals with trauma, identity and social issues. But talking about them is not the same as experiencing them, it is simply finding oneself in a comfort zone that works very well at the moment, generates discussion, etc., but which, perhaps in a few years' time, will be remembered as one of those “nice Netflix dramas”.
6 ½
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