[HanCinema's Film Review] "Love in the Big City"

Perhaps best known as an epic boys' love novel, "Love in the Big City" is in an odd spot for a feature film edition just for structural reasons. How to simplify a young gay man's love affairs over several years that they'll fit in just two hours? The approach "Love in the Big City" has to this problem is novel. Instead of focusing on the boyfriends of Heung-soo (played by Steve Sanghyun Noh), the film focuses on his best friend Jae-hee (played by Kim Go-eun), a young woman he met in college.

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Both of them are outsiders for very different reasons. Think external, not internal. Heung-soo passed for a straight man easily enough, and usually does, the main obstacle to this being that he finds most straight men to be fairly repugnant. To be fair, the main ones he meets are Jae-hee's boyfriends. And Jae-hee struggles with managing her own naturally expressive, rebellious personality with the all too human need to be loved.

Jae-hee gets slut shamed a lot in this movie, and it's really sad. There's a lot to be said about the tone that despite Heung-soo running afoul of violent homophobic bigotry in the 2010s, Jae-hee consistently comes off as the more isolated vulnerable character, with no friends aside from Heung-soo himself. While Heung-soo is similarly isolated, there's a much stronger sense that his aloofness is a choice. In the few conversations Jae-hee has with other women, there's no sense of solidarity. Just more slut shaming.

I know we're not quite far enough in the future yet for their to be such a thing as 2010s era nostalgia, but I appreciated how "Love in the Big City" was able to balance the fonder recollections of youth with the more unpleasant social stuff that was going on at the time. And which is, for that matter, still going on. The lack of political consciousness in "Love in the Big City" is likewise intriguing. Patriarchy is never the villain, so much as the poor choices made by individual characters.

"Love in the Big City" isn't exactly a date movie, but it is a good movie for the sake of being reflective about relationships. Jae-hee's poor decisions regarding men are never presented as if they were her fault, yet they are presented as if there were obvious red flags she should have noticed sooner. "Love in the Big City" does imply at the start that Jae-hee will have a happy ending, and it's telling that the only scene we get of that character is just a sincere, offscreen compliment that he wasn't expecting her to hear.

The relationship between Heung-soo and Jae-hee is always the focus though, even at that climactic wedding, the lesson clearly being that a wedding isn't a wedding unless the people you platonically love and get impulsive tattoos with are there too. That story is a touching one. Those expecting more gay stuff might be more disappointed, but worry not. "Love in the Big City - Drama" is the more all-encompassing adaptation of writer Park Sang-young's opus that you're looking for.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Love in the Big City" is directed by Lee Eon-hee, and features Kim Go-eun, Steve Sanghyun Noh, Jung Hwi, Oh Dong-min, Park Seon-hu, Kim Chae-eun. Release date in Korea: 2024/10/01.