I finished The First Frost late at night and stayed in the dark a while, holding on to the proposal Sang Yan makes to Wen Yifan before letting the day end.
Over thirty-two episodes the show walks back and forth across the same scenes, handing them to you from a different point of view each time until the people inside them come into focus. The camera does real work here. It presses you up against glass and lets you watch these lives through it, literally and otherwise.
The color carries the story. It opens in greys and blacks and warms toward cream and light as it goes. You see the shift in the rooms, in the clothes, in the faces themselves, the sharp angles softening, the bodies that held themselves like wound string finally loosening. By the end the smiles are out and the shoulders have come down.
Bai Jingting and Zhang Ruonan are fine performers who do the roles justice. What keeps The First Frost a step below Hidden Love, for me, is the build. This one is a series of montages, lives that cross and glance off each other. The characters stay behind it. Hidden Love let us into the rooms that made its leads who they were, the siblings, the families, the ordinary years. Here the glass never quite comes down.
Beautiful, then. Just held a little further from me than I wanted.
New to K-pop, or curious how fandom actually works? Naila’s Guide is my plain-English field guide to it (bias, comebacks, light sticks, the lot), drawn from my novel A Star Keeps Its Distance. Signed copies ship from Exton.
If this moved you, send a tip.
Leave a Reply