Here's a wonderfully written review of Scent of a Woman. The article isn't really all praises for the drama however it hit the exact points on why I love it.
For being a story about being given a death sentence, Scent of a Woman was remarkably uplifting. Despite following the heroine’s gradual decline as her cancer progressed, the focus remained on her determination to make her time count, to claim as much happiness for herself and her loved ones.
Scent of a Woman boasted prettier-than-average visuals (gotta love that new camera SBS has been trotting out) and an evocative soundtrack that was by turns breezy and moody. It also notably wove its tango motif into a greater thematic context — not always the case with gimmicky titles — allowing the dance scenes to mark significant moments of character development. In fact, the tangoing conveyed more heat than the makeout sessions, and wrung more tears than death scenes.
Marked by strong acting performances by leads Kim Sun-ah, Lee Dong-wook, and Eom Ki-joon, it’s a shame that so much of the middle stretch was bogged down by useless angst. Frankly, in a drama about a woman who’s dying, pissy parents only get to carry a certain amount of weight as sources of conflict. The ticking clock was a much greater concern for her and for us, making the chaebol meddlers a frustrating waste of time.
It was both refreshing and liberating, though, that this drama gave the heroine license to put herself first. Dramas historically love to canonize the self-sacrificial heroine, placing on pedestals the type of long-suffering women who bear their cancer diagnosis with stoic fortitude. (See: Choi Jin-shil in A Rosy Life.) I loved that Yeon-jae (Kim Sun-ah) refused to spend another second being the sacrificing wallflower, since she’d wasted too much time already. The woman’s got things to do, things to check off her list.
To that end, the bucket list served as a symbol of that goal: The items themselves were unimportant; what counted was the fact that they were there. And in a lovely twist, the bucket list got checked off and completed…and extended, because as long as the heroine had life to live, she wouldn’t stop approaching it with purpose. If closing that book (literally) would be tantamount to being ready to die, then this is a heroine who would never be ready to die. But in taking every day without regrets, she’d know that whenever that day came, she’d be as ready as she’d ever be. A worthy lesson for us all.
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