So I passed the test, right? Let’s meet up at the hotel bar at 7 for the real lesson. Oh! Enjoy the lunch box - June.
The note. The thing that starts it all. The thing that starts out at as one of June’s heavy botched operations - only that it hasn’t failed the way she thinks it has. The thing that shows us for certain that, despite everything, Robin isn’t completely immune to June’s charms.
It is clear that while June may not particularly admit to liking Robin, things have changed between them after the Brighton deal. Which is why in the scene where she prepares the lunch box, in the dead of night, she seems to shake herself and say The operations must go on. No matter what. Almost as if her new dynamic with Robin is distracting her from her goal.
June seems to slightly miss the mark here too. As with Operation Angel, preparing a special lunchbox personally for him calls for a certain amount of intimacy that they haven’t reached yet. The movie has given us enough indications of how he feels about having his space invaded, for him to comfortably take what June is giving him. Preparing lunch for someone at work is a very intimate, taking-care-of-a-loved-one thing to do, and for a hoarder who doesn’t like to even have his office touched, partaking of that lunch (especially if he nursed secret feelings for the person who made it) would definitely feel like too much too soon. It’s no wonder then that he takes the note, and passes the box to Yoon Mi.
June sees this differently. She sees it as yet another rejection of her efforts, yet another reason to believe he wants to have nothing to do with her. She assumes that since he’s not even opened the box, he wouldn’t have noticed the note either.
Su-yeoung Tries To Help
We don't see Su-yeoung much in the film, even though she is June's best friend. A phone call in the beginning of the film, and two scenes where she is seen aggressively pushing to get June back into the dating scene.
What we do know is that Su-yeoung has had her fair share of disappointment in her own relationships. She has been married once and by the way she speaks of love in this scene, she seems to have changed to a more 'practical' mindset in contrast to June's, which is clearly more emotional and romantic.
However, having being brought up in a culture that does value both love and marriage as an eventual goal (for instance, one does not bring one's significant other to meet the parents unless they're certain of getting married soon), Su-yeoung controls the situation the way any Korean friend would - by arranging a sogeatting.
A sogaetting (소개팅) is a kind of introductory meeting that's often set up between strangers through a mutual friend. Approaching someone you do not know is not very common in South Korea, so it usually falls on a third person to introduce the couple and to stick around in case the meeting isn't going as well as planned. If the two hit it off, the mutual friend leaves them to decide how to take things forward.
Su-yeoung's motives are very straightforward: get June to move on from Ju-yeoung, with someone. Anyone.
Ju-hyeoung may have receeded far, far behind in June's mind, but there is a part of her that clearly isn't completely over him yet. June isn't the kind of let go of her relationships that easily - she tends to not give up on a person unless there is no way even she can ignore the red flags. That's just the way she is. So when her best friend insults Ju-hyeoung, she is immediately defensive.
This is an important distinction to make, because it gives us a better idea of why June would agree so easily to getting back with him later on, just as she has begun to realise her feelings for Robin.
The Note
The scene splits into two halves: one that shows us June's disastrous date with Jin-guk, and another that shows us Robin waiting for June for an entire hour. We don't get a lot of opportunities to see Robin's point of view on certain things, but the film teases us with enough to recognize that what he feels towards June and what he shows are two different things. It's in this scene that we learn that Robin didn't completely ignore the lunchbox, that he kept her note with him...and most importantly, that he's very, very happy to see her that evening.
We also don't get many scenes of Robin shedding his impenetrable sheild and being vulnerable. The times that we do are mostly associated with his past - his grandfather's belongings and occasionally his bullet wound. Robin is depicted as a hoarder; someone who holds on to his memories and keeps them to remind himself of how far he has come, and why his present is what it is.
This is the only time perhaps we see Robin actually show some attachment to something he has received in the present, that he keeps to himself, that he allows himself a private moment of joy (for instance, he tilts his head slightly while reading it, an action we see him do only with his grandfather's photograph). He first looks around to see if no one is looking, and only then gives himself the luxury of letting his guard down. And this is especially surprising given that he always chooses enclosed settings where he is completely alone - like his room or the office - to reflect on these things.
I think it's a mark of how deeply June has affected him that this intensely private man can't help but fondly re-read a casual, friendly note she has sent him, in a setting as public as a hotel bar.
Sogaetting
By sogaetting standards, the meeting between Jin-guk and Min-june is an unmitigated disaster. Su-yeoung only knows him as a friend of a friend, and June herself has her doubts even before the date has begun.
Marriage in Korea is usually a topic reserved either for when a couple have become really serious, or when it is a matsun (맞선) which involves matchmakers/relatives and where the entire aim of the meeting is marriage itself. While there are people who do date with marriage in mind, a sogaetting is hardly the appropriate place to jump into discussions about weddings, especially with almost no input from the potential "bride".
But Jin-guk? Goes straight for the jugular. Starts talking about wedding preparations: how their families will travel to the venue, the perfect place for venue and stay, consulting a family Taoist. He goes as far as to speak of the money the bride should be spending on their travel, reminding her of her potential place in his life and what he thinks her duties are. He presumes this is what she wants, presumes he is a good enough catch that it doesn't even occur to him that she may not want this, and in fact doesn't even care. June barely gets to even speak in this "conversation". She is so uncomfortable, in fact, that she has to hide in a restroom to escape him.
To make things worse, Su-yeoung enables his behaviour, fawning over him and agreeing to everything he says ("oh, a hotel? That's just fabulous!" "I love having my fortune told!"), eventually encouraging the match and calling June crazy when the latter states that she isn't interested. It's clear that by this point June has found herself in a tight spot.
Blind Date
There are two reasons the blind date/bar scene is so important:
1. It is the first of many misunderstandings in their romance. It works to keep the couple apart, keep them from even guessing that the other person might love them: so that when Robin tells June how he feels in the end, the revelation is that much more emotional.
2. More importantly, it highlights a pretty huge cultural gap between Robin and June.
For the most part Robin has fit in rather well to his new environment, despite his struggle with the language. He is respected by his peers and subordinates in the office, is able to navigate his work space without too many hiccups, seems at home with the way his juniors address him. He seems so at home, in fact, that it would easy to assume that he would know a great deal about Korean culture outside the office as well.
However, the film gives us enough hints of his struggle to understand certain aspects of Korean culture. One is the usage of certain slang words, such as piksari and tungchigi, which June has to explain to him. Another is his lack of knowledge about how marriage and meeting the girl's family works, leaving him to commit a huge faux pas in front of her father.
Robin has no idea what a sogaetting is. When June translates the same into a word that seems more accessible to him ("blind date"), she unknowingly leaves out the cultural context of how a sogaetting works and who facilitates it. "Blind date", for Robin and June, mean very different things. For June it is an arranged meeting that mostly just allows for further casual interactions to test the waters. To Robin, it could range from being merely introduced by a common friend (who won't be as involved as someone facilitating a sokaetting would, possibly?) to an actual date, which involves flirting and possibly sex if both parties are interested. This is possibly also why he assumes straightaway that she spent the night with her date as well.
This is where Robin gets not only angry, but also confused. This is someone who has gone to great lengths to get him to wait at that bar, including cooking for him and slipping in a note that specifically mentioned a time and a place. This is also someone who, he assumes, ditched her plans with him to date someone else, and didn't so much as give him a head's up about doing so (part of this is also his fault: he never lets June know that he received the note, even though he was aware that she found out Yoon Mi had the box). When the truth, really, is that she agonized over having her meticulously prepared lunch rejected, worried about losing the note, was tricked into spending an evening with an overenthusiastic friend and a man who bored her to tears, and spent the night wrestling with her brother over the takeout bill.
A lot of what Robin does here is pretty alien to the character we know thus far. He gets starry-eyed over a note, waits an entire hour for the woman who wrote it, calls her twice to find out why she didn't make it, and is tense and angry enough to warrant letting off some steam on the treadmill. None of this works, so he calls her again, unable to just let the matter go.
Let's remember that so far, Robin has been all about control. He exercises control over his relationships and over his feelings, because he knows the consequences of letting someone else have power over him. He views relationships as a game - which means he would prefer to detach himself emotionally from the other person involved, and not be affected by their actions. So when June "ditches" him, he's immediately riled up, instantly jealous, and just as instantly frustrated that he's giving her this much power over him. Part of his anger lies in the fact that she's affecting him in a way that's making him break half his rules.
He is also angry because, for the first time in possibly a long while, he was genuinely happy about something, genuinely looking forward to meeting up with someone, and her (supposed) lack of concern has ruined that moment for him. He is still thinking on the lines of what he thinks a date would look like, and assumes June's actions by those parameters. Owing to the issues he carries from his past relationship, Robin definitely seems like a man doesn't like feeling like he doesn't matter, and that's how he feels around June right now.
June never gets the opportunity (until just before their cruise trip) to clear this up with him, owing to multiple assumptions: that he never got the note, that he was calling her from some random place just to ask the time, that he thinks she is pathetic. First because she thinks the note has gotten lost somewhere, then because her cell battery died out on her. So she is left thinking he doesn't particularly care, and Robin is left thinking that he means nothing to her besides a man who can teach her the rules of the game. It's an impression of himself that makes him even more reluctant to admit how he feels about her - both to himself and to her. It's an impression of himself that he carries to the rest of the film.
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*A lot of what I said about sogaetting I picked up from whatever I had read and watched. Korean readers, if I've gotten any of this wrong, I'm really sorry. Please do not hesitate to point it out so I can make corrections.
