LOVE IN THE BIG CITY Review: BFFs Kim Go-eun and Noh Sang-hyun Shine in Big Screen Marvel

Sometimes a film comes along and blindsides when you least expect it. The sublime surprise Love in the Big City is just such a film, enriching the landscape of Korean cinema in a year that has quietly seen low-key films return to the fore while their big-budget brethren have failed to capture the imagination of the public.

That is not to say that Love in the Big City wasn't a title worth looking forward to. It stars the supremely talented Kim Go-eun, currently on a major hot streak, alongside rising Pachinko star Noh Sang-hyun (aka Steve Noh), is directed by E.oni, whose 2003 debut ...ing remains one of the most affecting Korean screen romances, and had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film is based on part of Park Sang-young's acclaimed novel of the same name -- curiously, the whole novel is also the subject of an anthology series premiering three weeks later on Korean TV -- and focuses on the friendship between two roommates, a closeted gay man and a vivacious young man, and their respective romances.

Kim plays Jae-hee, a college student who rails against the conformist society she lives in the only way she knows how, smoking on campus during the day and and drinking the nights away. During one of those nights, she spots classmate Heung-soo kissing a young man. She keeps his secret and soon the pair become best friends, partying their worries away away from the prying eyes of their families, and eventually moving in together.

Jae-hee is a hopeless romantic who quickly falls head over heels for people. Trouble is, this prevents her from using her head as she tends to fall for the wrong people. As a closeted homosexual, Heung-soo has a very different dating life and while he does find a good partner, frictions arise between them as Heung-soo lacks the courage to come out alongside him.

As the years pass, Jae-hee and Heung-soo's friendship deepens but adult life conspires to drive them apart. Jae-hee's carefree nature is steadily stamped out when she enters the workforce and it becomes harder to Heung-soo's identity from new partners that come into her life. Meanwhile, Heung-soo's reality remains the same. While Jae-hee's grows out of a phase of her youth, Heung-soo is confronted with an unchanging reality.

Effortlessly entertaining and emotionally hard-hitting, the film has a potential zeitgeist-grabbing vibe reminiscent of the 2018 hit women's drama Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. This is in no small part down to the fact that this is an exceedingly rare mainstream Korean film that explicitly foregrounds an unambiguously queer character. It does so magnificently, thanks to Noh's powerhouse (and star-making) performance and a combination of scripting and directing that empathetically foregrounds queer themes without ever coming across as an issues film: it's far too rich, nuanced and naturalistic to be so simply pigeonholed.

On the contrary, Love in the Big City succeeds precisely because it feels so organic. As a slice-of-life emotional drama with modern, sexy and relatable characters, it slaloms through all the signposts usually favoured by the ubiquitous Korean dramas that stream around the world, yet it refashions them to such a fresh, perspicacious and invigorating degree that it puts much of that extremely popular medium to shame.

This is a two-hour film with far more texture and emotional ballast than most 16-episode dramas that attempt similar things, yet it never comes close to feeling overloaded. Instead, its world feels lived in. Thanks to terrific dialogue and vivid direction, the show's moral lessons crescendo in scintillating moments of well-earned catharsis.

And, of course, there's no way to talk about Love in the Big City without singling out the sublime Kim. From Yumi's Cells to Little Children to Exhuma, Kim has cemented herself in recent years as one of Korea's top talents, but here she outdoes herself with a beguiling turn that combines strength and vulnerability to an enormously affecting degree. It's tempting to compare her to screen icon Jeon Do-yeon, who had a similarly singular presence among her generation of screen performers. Incidentally, the pair, who previously worked together on Memories of the Sword, will soon reunite in the drama The Price of Confession.

It remains to be seen how Korea's staunchly conservative society will respond to this marvellously progressive gem of a film, but that is precisely what makes it such an important moment in Korean cinema. Let's hope that society is ready to gaze back at itself through this scintillating cinematic mirror.