Love in the Big City

Love in the Big City (2024) is adapted from Park Sang-young's award winning novel. The book covers twenty years of a gay man's life; the film takes only one section of it, the Jae-hee chapter. Jae-hee is the girl everyone at university talks about. She answers to nobody, lives as she likes, and is pushed out for it. Heung-soo is a closeted gay man, outside for his own reasons. They meet, become roommates, and live together for years. The romance of the film is not between them. What it describes is how a bond nobody counts as a relationship can turn out to be the longest relationship in a person's life. Lovers come and go. Jae-hee and Heung-soo remain. Mainstream Korean cinema has few films that put a gay character at the centre without apology, and this is one of them. That is exactly why it was argued about in Korea. Kim Go-eun plays the part like a burst of energy, and when the film lowers its tone in the second half that energy takes on more weight. It runs 118 minutes. Good for: Korean cinema, LGBT stories, and drama about friendship. Less good for: there is homophobic violence, and heavy drinking and sex throughout.