Anna (Review)
Contains light spoilers!
Anna is a web series and vehicle for Bae Suzy initially aired as 6 episodes, but later made available in 8-episode director’s cut (reviewed here). Bae Suzy is Lee Yu-mi/Lee Anna: a woman of modest social background who steals an identity of rich socialite Lee Anna (Jung Eun-chae) to live a life of luxury. Thanks to that she gets an academic position at a prestigious academy and marries a rich CEO (Kim Jun-han). However, it turns out that the web of lies Yu-mi/Anna built around herself causes her an increasing number of predicaments and she risks losing all.
Bae Suzy shines in the role showing a wide range of acting skills and stellar performance. The show has a serious tone, unlike many K-Dramas, thanks to that Bae Suzy was able to make her portrayal realistic and believable. Her character undergoes a significant development and transformation throughout the series, from a poor and modest high school girl to a stunning and elegant woman of high society. Yu-mi’s choices and decisions are often off-putting and morally objectionable, still, we root for her and hope everything turns out well. At the same time the show keeps viewers in suspense, while Yu-mi gets entangled in the dangerous scheme devised by her devious husband which eventually endangers her life as well.
The show asks important questions like: Is social advancement possible only through lies and deception? Does poverty justify immoral choices? Yu-mi/Anna and her friend Ji-won (Park Ye-young) ask these and related questions as tensions increase in the show. The show ponders over inequality and depicts how privileged people treat those less fortunate. Both original Lee Anna (Jung Eun-chae), and Yu-mi’s husband, Choi Ji-hoon (Kim Jun-han; who like Yu-mi comes from modest background), are shown as being condescending and unpleasant towards their employees. Choi Ji-ho particularly is often violent and capricious. Yu-mi realizes that she slowly transforms in the same direction, which forces her to stop and rethink her choices.
While the focus on Bae Suzy/Yu-mi is the highlight of the show, it sometimes happens at the cost of other aspects of the series, like for example its plot. Viewers are often forced to suspend their disbelief to accept that Yu-mi’s cons and frauds were successful. Writers clearly needed them to progress the plot, but they are often not very believable. For example, Yu-mi steals Lee Anna’s diploma, passport, and money seemingly with no consequences, and real Lee Anna doesn’t realize that until the final episodes. Then Yu-mi embarks on an academic career with a stolen identity, seemingly with no previous experience, education, or skills. She becomes a famous professor in no time with little effort on her part. Either because of writers’ ignorance or intentional simplification we are asked to believe that’s how academia works. Then Yu-mi lives with her stollen identity out in the open for years, being a visible as university teacher, socialite, and wife of well-known CEO and aspiring politician. Yet seemingly nobody notices that she is not the real Lee Anna until her journalist friend, Ji-won, begins to question her identity near the end of the series. And everything happens during the era of internet and social media.
Also, some plot points seem to be superfluous, like extended prologue to the series. We learn, for example, about Yu-mi’s childhood, when the wife of an American army officer tutored her. However, it’s hard to say what purpose this prologue serves for the show, perhaps only to justify why Yu-mi knows English? (Despite the fact that she barely uses it during her life.) Starting the show during Yu-mi’s high school years would make much more sense. Depicting protagonist’s childhood is often feature of K-Dramas, so maybe writers thought it should be done here too, but they failed to pay it off in the later part of the show.
Overall, Anna should be praised for the performance of Bae Suzy and interesting portrayal of Korean society. However, the plot and the structure of the show are not without its flaws.
Anna on Wikipedia and MyDramaList
