Caution: The review below contains sensitive topics not suited for adolescents and teenage readers

Once, a professor told me that he had a friend who couldn’t sleep without watching a K-drama. That is as much as people need Korea now. It has become a basic necessity, like food, shelter, electricity, and the internet.

And the young people, always dreaming of becoming millionaires, need Penny Pinchers (2011). As long as they’re young, all of them believe they will be millionaires someday. Well, that’s not how it works out for most in the end. Eventually, dreamers stop dreaming one day. This is what Penny Pinchers (2011) is all about. It’s Korean name is ‘티끌모아 로맨스 (Tikkeulmoa romaenseu)’, which translates into Many A Little Romance. Officially, it’s a romcom.

The story takes place in the mad whirlpool of the city named Seoul. Young audiences are very likely to find their own mirror image in the film’s two protagonists, Gu Hong-Shil and Chun Ji-Woong, portrayed by Han Ye-seul and Song Joong-Ki.

And let’s face it. It is a Song Joong-Ki film. And that’s why we are still watching it after all these years. And we are not aging properly. Why should we?

The Korean Bonnie & Clyde

Once you finish Penny Pinchers, Bonnie & Clyde will knock at your door. They were an American duo famous for bank robbery. 

Was it America where robbing banks became an anti-capitalist philosophy, a lifestyle even? No one knows, but their story has been adapted to films countless times. The Bollywood version starred Aishwarya Rai and Rani Mukherjee in Bunty Aur Babli (2005).

Penny Pinchers has no direct relation to the story, of course. But the characters share almost the same adventures. Here, too, a duo is out on the street conning people. Their primary job is finding scraps from abandoned houses, recycling them, and selling them at higher prices.

Other things they do look like this:

  • Putting ice cream into the short-circuit box next to a playground to make the electricity blow off, then they start selling their stuff.
  • Playing the best man and bridesmaid at weddings.
  • Selling baby octopus in a van by faking the accent of the islands they come from.

However, there is no bank robbery. Sadly. But the girl, Hong-Shil, keeps dreaming of becoming a millionaire. Ji-Woong becomes her accomplice.

Their mischief is fun to watch and heartbreaking. And as a romcom’s plot would have it, they too lose everything in the end, except each other.

Hong-Shil has her own philosophy: “If we don’t take the stuff, someone else will take it. You know what happens when a cheetah chases a pack of antelopes? They don’t try to outrun the cheetah. They try to outrun the other antelopes. That’s how you survive.”

Also, she says there are three things a girl can’t have: diseases, religion, and a boyfriend, since “all of them cost money.”

Ji-Woong, meanwhile, is a good-for-nothing, hypersexual character. In fact, he’s a little embodiment of the unholy deity of joblessness. He just decides to tag along.

There is nothing else under the sun that the young audience could relate to more. But ultimately, things don’t end well for our Bonnie and Clyde. They go bankrupt, to their last penny.

A Charming Prince, But…

Song Joong-Ki is unmistakably the charm of the film. After Vincenzo (2021) and Reborn Rich (2022), it is highly likely that anyone watching the film in 2026 has probably started streaming it to see his face to begin with.

Joong-Ki, despite being a megastar, has appeared in very few films himself. His early hit dramas like Descendants of the Sun (2016) had male characters who delivered way too many sexist dialogues, including his own. With his rise to prominence as one of the earliest ‘flower boys’ of Korea, it came under scrutiny from time to time.

Ji-Woong is too real as a male character. He has no job and no clue how to survive when the next day arrives. But all he does is watch porn on his laptop—in the attic he is renting.

He seems too familiar. The only thing neither he nor Hong-Shil did was take drugs. Everything else is real, made of real flesh and blood, hyperreal. The tough girl Hong-Shil is just as real, too.

Ji-Woong gets his own failed little condom-buying adventures, once again, very believably. He loses his chance of having sex with a girl named Mint. The next thing we see is him sitting at a bus stop under a lightbox, which ironically glows with “Dreams Come True.”

The execution of the male character is really worthy of applause. It resorts to portraying another specimen of the male species who behaves like a sexual beast— but he is also good at heart.

He plans to sell one of his kidneys to make some money. Ultimately, this leads to him spotting a mark of stitches on Hong-Shil’s waist. He immediately believes she has sold one of her kidneys. And perhaps this is the only reason why he falls in love with her— out of extreme remorse for things he had nothing to do with, and sadness.

But towards the end of the story, he finally discovers why Hong-Shil let him stay at her place, or, better to say, in the tent on her terrace. And this is the first instance where he almost gets violent with her, almost turning physically abusive.

One might argue that the character needed it. This makes the male character convincing. But if there is one problematic side of Ji-Woong and the entire story, it is this—subtly promoting gender violence.

He gets violent once more, at the police officer who made nasty comments at Hong-Shil. And it happens almost immediately, right after he attempted to slap Hong-Shil. It becomes his greatest act of chivalry.

And The Girl…

In contrast, Hong-Shil’s character is written as a practical person who nevertheless fails to see the web of lies she’s caught up in while weaving her own.

In a nutshell, she is chasing money and that’s all she cares about. She is pretty good at her own trade and knows very well how to make enough to survive. But somewhat predictably, she falls victim to a financial scam.

She is not really playing a very big feminist in the story. She is just a girl, without a whole lot of ideologies. And she is still great for a female character written by a man—great enough.

It doesn’t escape the eyes of the audience that she never becomes Ji-Woong’s sexual fantasy, except, perhaps, in the climax. By then, she has already become his life partner.

However, for a movie so full of sex and porn, it is still problematic when the girl never experiences sexual arousal herself. Not even once.

The other girl, Mint, does, though. She turns off the switch of a table lamp that looks like a penis, and turns it back on.

A Tribute

Kim Jung-Hwan is a rather small name in the crowd of other Korean directors. He is the director. As for Song Joong-Ki, he was still a new face when it was made—literally a twink, to say.

If one looks closely, they will see that both his and Ye-seul’s characters probably have some autobiographical elements from Jung-Hwan’s own life. One of them is the 1986 Korean film Winter Wanderer. Its scenes keep popping up on every TV screen the director could find by the roadside throughout the story.

Winter Wanderer was directed by Kwak Ji-kyoon, who committed suicide just the year prior to the making of Penny Pinchers. Very evidently, Jung-Hwan pays tribute to Ji-kyoon in his own treatment of a story of what the newspapers called a confused, undecided film on “youth unemployment and poverty.”

And all this is somehow tied to the memories of Hong-Shil’s deceased mother. It is a godawful thing, but somewhere it gives away some biological facts about a heteropatriarchal movie director. Regardless of how romantic he might get, he can’t escape the womb. It blossoms in the form of a tree, where Hong-Shil once scattered her mother’s ashes.

The tree becomes the ultimate trophy for Ji-Woong to win. And his heart awakens, very genuinely. Without faking anything. He spends his last penny and sells away everything he loves, to buy the tree before it is replanted elsewhere. It includes:

  • His ukulele
  • His laptop
  • His Audi scooter
  • And his collection of porn

Eventually, he withdraws the last penny from his last savings book.

The Conclusion

Interestingly enough, Ji-Woong from 2011 is a millennial. And the economic reality is still the same for Gen Z. Nothing has changed, which makes the story all the more relatable.

Penny Pinchers did not get old. If you sit on your sofa to watch it, it won’t feel like yesterday. You can choose to happily disregard all the negative reviews it once earned for itself—duck them all!

The Korean Bonnie and Clyde, through the turn of events and gusty winds of misfortune one after another, did win in the end. And the way Jung-Hwan shows their love was nowhere exaggerated or formulaic or cliché; it was completely real—with all its ups and downs.

And Penny Pinchers also feels like Penis Pinchers every now and then. For all we know, it could have been the name. And that comes with its own biological limitations, of the construction of a female character who never stopped mourning her dead mother versus the boy who was an avid porn watcher. But thankfully, that’s the only limitation it has.

Other than that, it has awesome soundtracks. Penny Pinchers gifted the world one of the best renditions of the American folk song “The Water Is Wide.” In Song Joong-Ki’s own voice. He sings another skit about cockroach poop and diarrhea curry. That’s how the lyric goes. And it is unforgettable.

Ultimately, the story ends very believably—with both of them together and without a hint of sadness lingering in the air. As either a couple of KFC chickens in capitalism or just a pair of lovebirds, they keep on living—perhaps happily ever after.