Private Lives review, episodes 3-4: Cha Joo Eun mopes over her scam marriage and chases after the missing Jeong Hwan
By Bryan Tan
This review contains spoilers and covers episodes 3-4 of Private Lives, which is currently available on Netflix.
After having been left at the altar, con artist Cha Joo Eun (Seohyun) finds herself in a constant daze, drinking herself into a stupor on most nights and listlessly wondering if her fiancé Lee Jeong Hwan (Go Kyung Pyo) was really a fellow con artist who ‘filmed a marriage documentary’ on her.
Private Lives started off brilliantly as a heist series revolving around Cha Joo Eun and her trickster family, but it does slow down a lot in episodes three to four, with a lot of moping and drinking from a very depressed Joo Eun.
It does reveal a lot about her fiancé Jeong Hwan in a number of flashbacks. In addition to being the owner of his own private eye detective firm specialising in finding missing people and spying on cheating men, Jeong Hwan is actually an employee in the conglomerate, GK Technology, which we assumed was a lie he made up. But this company has rather shady practices; Jeong Hwan is part of the corporate espionage team which deals with international technological theft.
Yet knowing all this, it is still unclear as to Jeong Hwan’s motives in scamming Joo Eun. She tries to track him down, scouring the internet for fishy-looking private eye services, and ironically comes across Jeong Hwan’s firm, which she approaches for its services.
Poor Joo Eun is definitely feeling the very real consequences of her failed, sham marriage. The police contact her to interrogate her about Jeong Hwan, who apparently died in a car accident after his vehicle crashes through a rail guard off a cliff. Like anybody is going to believe that... Loan sharks whom Jeong Hwan supposedly borrowed money from also show up at her house, which she believed was bought but was actually a rental. The nerve of this guy!
Seohyun, we also need to talk about how skinny you are. Gurl, are you trying to slide through cracks in doors to steal things or something? We all know you’re a con artist, but you need to have some flesh on you to convince people you’re a live human being to scam them. Somebody needs to feed this woman!
The ultra-skinny Seohyun, I mean Joo Eun, manages to slide her skeletal frame under a fence (convenient eh?) into a mansion where Jeong Hwan was last seen. It also turns out that the person in this mansion who used to mentor Jeong Hwan is none other than Jeong Bok Gi’s (Kim Hyo Jin) partner Kim Jae Wook (Kim Young Min).
Joo Eun really needs to learn how to be a better con artist. You can’t make a living out of it if you get conned into marrying a guy that you don’t know anything about, and didn’t even foresee the problems that would come after. I mean, wouldn’t you usually help plan your own wedding and sort out the house together and everything? How did she not see this coming a mile away?
Catch the next episodes of Private Lives, which are released every week on Wednesdays and Thursdays, to find out if Joo Eun will ever learn to be a proper con artist.
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