“Vincenzo” (빈센조)

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
May 9, 2021

Vincenzo Cassano (played by Song Joong-Ki)
Hong Cha-Young (played by Jeon Yeo-Been)
Jang Han-Seok (played by Ok Taec-Yeon)
Jang Han-Seo (played by Kwak Dong-Yeon)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

There is so much going on in “Vincenzo” that it could have been a sensory overload. But screenwriter Park Jae-Bum and director Kim Hee-Won created the series in such a way that even with all the subplots, viewers aren’t overwhelmed by the various storylines or the cast of characters that grow on you with each and every episode. When there is a sense of urgency with some of the plot points, Park and Kim take their time in letting the story unfold in a believable way. Well, as believable a story as you can have about a Korean-born child who ends up becoming a consigliere for a top mafia don in Italy.

There was a sense of loss throughout this series. For the protagonist, Vincenzo, he lost his mother and birth country in one fell swoop, when her terminal illness forced her to give him up for adoption. But for other characters, they, too, were driven by loss on a grand scale. Hank-Seok showed early signs of being a psychopath as a young boy. But instead of getting him a psychiatrist to treat his homicidal anger, his father shipped him off to the United States, letting his disease fester overseas. Why? Because he was a horrible parent, who didn’t want to acknowledge that his child had serious issues.

Born to a poor woman whose health was faltering, Park Joo-Hyung was adopted to a family in Italy, who renamed him Vincenzo. He eventually worked his way up the mafia ranks to become the Cassano family’s consigliere. After the don dies, he flees Italy to escape his adoptive brother, who views him as a rival and wants him dead. He returns to his birth country, but it’s not because he feels any ties to South Korea. Rather, it’s to take home one and a half tons of gold bars that he had stashed away in Geumga Plaza for a Chinese billionaire. (Did anyone else notice the plaza’s name? Geum/금 means gold in Korean. ㅋㅋ) With the latter dead, the gold is now his. He thinks it’ll be easy to move the tenants out of the dilapidated building into a new one he’s offering to them for free.

He would be wrong.

The tenants are a mishmash of weirdos, who have banded together to create their own version of family. They include a cranky dry cleaner, an Italophile chef whose cooking isn’t as authentic as he leads others to believe, an ajumma who sells tteok-bokki snacks in her little cafe, a morose piano teacher who looks like she stepped out of “Ring,” and married pawnshop owners whose level of physical strength may be greater than they let on.

One thing is for certain: Everyone develops a crush on Vincenzo at one point or another. And it’s the men who fawn over him more than the women.

Vincenzo forms an alliance of sorts with an Hong Yoo-Chan (Yoo Jae-Myung), an idealistic attorney, who fights for justice, even when he knows he won’t be able to win the case. His adversaries include the lawyers at Wusang, who will do whatever it takes to protect the Babel Group. The latter is such a powerful conglomeration that it has bought the loyalty of the country’s most powerful players. And Yoo-Chan is disappointed that his daughter has chosen to work for Wusang.

Eventually, Cha-Young leaves Wusang to fight the dirty attorneys she used to work for.

It’s easy to root for Vincenzo and #TeamGeumga and present them as the wronged heroes. But in many ways, this is a series where everyone is dirty. Wusang and Babel are vile, but they aren’t hypocrites. They see nothing wrong in killing others to protect themselves. Vincenzo is like them in this respect. He will do what it takes to right wrongs done to him and his family.

The Geumga residents and Cha-Young know they are breaking the law by helping Vincenzo. But when the law is stacked against them and the only way they can get justice is by breaking the law, it seems like a valid — and even somewhat of an honorable — option.

But. It’s still illegal.

There are many villains in this series, but one of the greatest is Choi Myung-Hee (Kim Yeo-Jin), a former prosecutor who was recruited by Wusang to work with Babel Group. Initially, she seems like a somewhat harmless lawyer who likes to Zumba in her office and win at all costs. But it’s the at all costs that proves to be problematic. She is as evil and cold-blooded as the clients she is hired to protect.

This series, though, belongs to Song Joong-Ki. The change in his facial expression — from grief, to anger, to full-on revenge mode — lets viewers know everything he is thinking without a word being said.

Meta Moment: One of Vincenzo’s aliases in this series is that of Tae-Ho. That was the name of the character Song Joong-Ki played in the film, “Space Sweepers.”

Airdates: Twenty episodes aired on tvN from February 20 to May 2, 2021. Each episode ran about 70- to 90-minutes long.

Spoiler Alert: Ok Taec-Yeon starts off in the series playing a bumbling associate/intern at Wusang. He is happy go lucky and has a huge crush on Cha-Young. In reality, he’s Jang Han-Seok, who not only killed classmates when he was a student, but also his own father. He brutalizes his younger half brother Han-Seo (Kwan Dong-Yeon) on a regular basis. Near the end of the series, Han-Seo’s story arc developed beautifully. Starved for familial affection, he found a brother figure in Vincenzo.

There is a slow simmering romance between Vincenzo and Cha-Young that never reaches its full potential. And I liked it that way. This series was more about righting wrongs and seeking vengeance, than it was about date nights and shared kisses (although there are a couple of those as well).

Because Vincenzo follows through on destroying Wusang — which includes taking down all the major players — there is no way he can remain in Korea after the carnage he creates. But he is able to buy a small island near Malta, where he created a kind of safehouse for his family. It’s implied that Cha-Young will join him there, at least for a visit.

Adoption Element: When Vincenzo was eight years old, his mother — who was too sick to take care of him — sent him to a child welfare center. Her hope was that she would recover enough to get custody of her son again. But with her health faltering and wanting a better life for her son than she could give him, she left him there, where he was eventually adopted by an Italian couple.

It’s not clear if the couple renamed him or he still went by his Korean name during his youth. But after a robber killed them, Vincenzo joined the mafia, where he got revenge by killing his parents’ murderer. The powerful Cassano family don treated him like his own son and my guess is that’s when Park Joo-Hyung became Vincenzo Cassano.

Which leads me to Vincenzo knowing how to speak Korean. It’s highly unlikely that Vincenzo could be completely fluent in Korean without having grown up with parents who spoke it to him on a daily basis and/or having immersed himself in Korean studies in Korea, where he only spoke Korean for a considerable period of time. From what he said about his previous visits to Seoul, he didn’t. He was in Korea at least once before to handle business. But he left the country once business was completed. Even if he had taught himself to speak Korean, how was he able to parse Korean news stories, much less contract law in Hangul?

I really wish K-drama scriptwriters would stop implying that adoptees have this muscle memory to retain a language they knew for a handful of years as a child. That’s not how it works. Some Koreans expect real-life adoptees who were raised in Western countries to be able to speak and understand Korean simply because they look Korean. And many adoptees have spoken about how they were shamed when they couldn’t speak their native tongue.

It would’ve been nice if they gave a little backstory about Vincenzo’s language skills, just like how they explained Hae-Seok’s fluency in English. (Remember? His father sent him to hide in the U.S. for a few years after he became a serial killer).

Vincenzo and his mother (Yoon Bok-In) get to spend some quality time together before she is killed. Both knew they were mother and son, but neither acknowledged it out loud to each other. That, I think, is one of Vincenzo’s biggest regrets: He didn’t get to tell her that he loved her and forgave her for doing what she thought was best at the time.

© 2021 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved