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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Ju Ji-hoon, Jung Yu-mi
Latest Nielsen rating: 6.45 per cent
Ju Ji-hoon (Kingdom) and Jung Yu-mi (The School Nurse Files) go head to head in the school-set romantic comedy Love Your Enemy, playing the youngest generation of two feuding families.
That may sound like Romeo and Juliet, but make no mistake, Ju’s Seok Ji-won and Jung’s Yoon Ji-won – who, in addition to sharing the same first name, were born on the same day – are just as passionate in their hatred of each other as their parents.


The Ji-wons spent their childhood together as students constantly at each other’s necks at Dokmok High School.
Yoon Ji-won, now in her thirties, works there as a teacher. Her grandfather Yoon Jae-ho (Kim Kap-soo, Queen of Tears), with whom she lives in a charming house, is the chairman of the foundation that runs the school. At least he is at the very beginning of the show.
Love Your Enemy begins with Dokmok High School in crisis. The board of directors is scheduled to hold a vote to decide if they will allow the construction company run by Seok Ji-won’s father, Seok Kyung-tae (Lee Byung-joon), to take over.
The vote does not go Jae-ho’s way and Kyung-tae gloatingly takes over, only too happy to carry out the revenge he has been planning for years.

Generations ago, Kyung-tae’s family used to be tenant farmers on Jae-ho’s family land. Kyung-tae’s father finally turned things around when he built his company. As youths, Jae-ho and Kyung-tae’s father – who are the 34th generation of their respective lines – even fell for the same girl and came to blows over her.
Now Kyung-tae plans to turn the school into a golf course and he wants his dashing son Ji-won to take over the post of chairman of the school board and put his plan into action. However, Ji-won, who has just returned from America, has no interest in carrying out his father’s revenge.
He changes his mind when he goes out drinking with an old school friend who casually mentions that he recently met Yoon Ji-won at a reunion, who claimed not to remember her male rival.
Ji-won shows up in his father’s bedroom drenched in rain late that night and ominously announces he will take the job.

As he arrives at Dokmok, he crosses paths with his former school rival. Seemingly confirming his suspicions, she brushes past without recognising him, although in truth, she woke up sick that morning and one of her students has just stepped on her glasses.
They meet again later that day in the teachers’ room and this time the feverish Ji-won does seem to recognise him. She stands up and pinches him hard on the cheek before pushing him across the room several times and running away in embarrassment.
It has been 18 years since they last met but the cold war between these former classmates explodes once more. Seok Ji-won becomes more involved in school functions and meetings than he should, so that they can argue while others in the room stare at them dumbfounded, much like the student council meetings they used to attend in school.
One of the greatest battles in their school days involved the Ji-wons competing to take first place in exams. If she won, he would have to call her by the honorific nuna – “older sister” and a humiliation, since they are the same age. But if he won, she would have to go out with him.

Yoon Ji-won won that battle, but it does not take long for a similar wager to be placed during a drunken dinner in the present.
The lilacs on the school grounds haven’t bloomed for several years. He bets that the flowers will bloom this year, once again asking her to go out with him if he wins – since that is the last thing in the world she would entertain, as she has just told everyone else at the table. But if she wins, he has to resign as chairman.
Clearly what is driving all of this petty antagonism are some long-standing unresolved feelings. The show does not try to pull the wool over our eyes there, making it clear early on that there was something between them.
Yoon Ji-won wakes up with a start every morning from the same dream, a snatch of which serves as the opening sequence of the series. The teenage Yoon Ji-won races passed her classmates up Namsan Mountain in Seoul on a snowy night. At the top she appears to wait for someone.

While she may be dreaming it now, this event is soon revealed to be something that actually happened and which involved the other Ji-won, although for now we do not know exactly what.
Love Your Enemy is fuelled by engaging performances by Ju and Jung, whose hot-headed confrontations liven up what is otherwise a comforting and engaging watch built on a premise of familiar K-drama stereotypes.
Love Your Enemy is streaming on Disney+.


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Ju Ji-hoon (left) and Jung Yu-mi in a still from Love Your Enemy.

Ju Ji-hoon as Seok Ji-won (left) and Jung Yu-mi as Yoon Ji-won in a still from K-drama romcom Love Your Enemy.

Jung Yu-mi as teacher Yoon Ji-won in a still from Love Your Enemy.

Ju Ji-hoon as Yoon Ji-won’s rival Seok Ji-won in a still from Love Your Enemy.

Yoon Ji-won, played by Jung Ju-mi, pinches the cheek of Seok Ji-won, played by Ju Ji-hoon, in a still from Love Your Enemy.

Jung as Yoon Ji-won in a still from Love Your Enemy.

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A man and woman from two feuding families are reunited after 18 years in this romcom set around a high school


A man and woman from two feuding families are reunited after 18 years in this romcom set around a high school.
