Review: Wish You

Pure, low-stakes fluff. Plus a music video every ten minutes!

Welcome to Tongzhi Tuesday, a series where I’ll be reviewing queer Asian and AAPI content in whatever form that may come in, whether it be movies, TV, music, or the occasional manhua. Subjects and tone will range from comical to serious, depending on my mood. Yes, this is a veiled excuse to talk about the things I like. Want to suggest something for me to review? Leave me a comment below or email me at lindaiyupro@gmail.com. 

tongzhi (同志): lit. “same aspiration,” meant to denote “comrade” but has been adopted by the Mandarin-speaking LGBTQ+ community to mean “gay” or “queer”

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In case you thought this newsletter was dedicated solely to pretentious prestige films or to the brutal tearing down of those very films, I’m here to prove you wrong! Suppress your surprise. I actually enjoyed Wish You, Netflix’s treacly-sweet Korean BL (boys love) movie. 

The distinction here is that I believe in judging films (and all art) on what they profess to be. If a movie is going to parade around in self-important aesthetics and thematics, cloaked in a marketing campaign that calls it “necessary” and “era-defining,” then of course I’ll knock it down a peg by exposing where the artifice fails. (My Sag rising revels in a good dressing-down.) But if all a movie wants to be is an uncomplicated good time, then that’s exactly where I’m going to meet it. Wish You is the latter of such films, and as one of South Korea’s first forays into the BL genre, it doesn’t have to be anything more. 

I’ll be upfront: if you don’t like the corny contrivances of K-dramas, then you probably won’t like Wish You, either. The film pairs Yoon Sang-yi (Sang Lee), a pianist who also works as an assistant at a music agency, and Kang In-soo (Kang In-soo), an aspiring singer-songwriter, in several meet-cutes, replete with slow-motion shots from multiple angles. We see the blossoming of romance mainly from Sang-yi’s side, who first encounters In-soo busking on the street and falls in love on the spot. When Sang-yi’s company seeks new talent to represent, Sang-yi’s intrepid boss Lee Yoo-jin (Park Subin) signs on Kang In-soo, who’s growing in popularity on the internet. And so the two leads are brought together by fate (or, in actuality, the Gods of K-drama). Since we can’t have a good BL drama without one of BL’s many cheesy tropes, Sang-yi is then. ordered by Yoo-jin (an incredible wingwoman!) to move in with In-soo during his training period. While under the same roof, the two become fast friends and develop a deep bond of trust that soon, of course, far exceeds friendship.

Unfortunately, this movie’s big Achilles heel is its poor pacing. Each scene of dialogue is interluded with what can only be described as long music video sequences, drenching its pensive leads under dramatic lighting and crooning love songs. This strange structure is the result of Wish You, originally an 8-episode webseries, being stitched together into a feature-length film for its Netflix release. I don’t know the reasoning behind the decision, which feels detrimental to the presentation of the whole thing, but what we end up with is a reasonably enjoyable showcase every ten minutes or so for the songs that were specially written for the drama. 

If you can look past these small gripes, at the core of Wish You is a surprisingly tender and endearing story. Kang In-soo and Yoon Sang-yi have an easy chemistry between them, buttressed by the contrast between their personalities — Sang-yi is the shy, nervous one, and In-soo is the confident yet mysterious one. The film takes its time to build not only the emotional connection between them, but their individual stories too. We learn that In-soo veils some hidden hurt that expresses itself as a desperation to succeed in his music career, a hurt that Sang-yi helps to unknowingly heal, and through working on In-soo’s songs, Sang-yi starts to find confidence in his own voice as well. You find yourself invested in the characters pretty quickly, and by the end, you’re rooting for both of them to succeed.

For fans of pure fluff, Wish You is the kind of low stakes and gentle romance we all love to indulge in. It may not wrestle with the deeper questions about queerness (does it have to?), but like a good dessert, its sweetness will linger in your mouth long after the last bite. 

Wish You is currently streaming on Netflix.