Review of the drama Love in the Big City / 대도시의 사랑법

Something I’ve been mulling over for years is contemporary Korean literature. I read a lot of Asian literature, and post about it on this blog, and I even did my master’s thesis on colonial and postcolonial Korean women writers. That’s also here on this website for the sake of accessibility.

Anyways, I spend a lot of time reading. We’re in a bit of a Renaissance when it comes to accessing Asian literature, especially from Korea, so when books like Love in the Big City come out, I get to read them fairly quickly now. I read the novel when it was first released in English, then forgot about it.

I had heard about the movie when it was coming out, but when my blog started getting a ton of hits for the book blog post review on it, I thought that maybe the movie had come out. It took a few days for me to realize there was a drama version I had no idea about, and that it was available on Viki.

And as the traffic continued to funnel in, I decided I needed to take a look myself. The drama is only eight episodes long, so this was the perfect way for me to get sucked back into the drama life for a few days as I binge watched the episodes.

Here is my review and summary!

A writer with HIV navigates his life and relationships in Seoul.

We begin this series right where the book begins. It also is split into segments of sort throughout the main character, Go Young, and his big life transitions as a gay man trying to make it as a writer. At the beginning, he lives with Choi Mi-ae.

She’s his best friend and straight, and their relationship seems pretty solid at the beginning of the show. There are some quirks unique to them, such as how he puts cigarettes into the refrigerator for her just the way she likes it.

However, the cracks begin to appear throughout the episode, and this becomes what I dubbed the first rupture of his life. In a way this is a coming of age story in his twenties and thirties, and Go Young is just trying to learn how to survive while also working a full-time job and balancing his writer life.

The series takes place across ten years, and we get a glimpse of his major relationships throughout this time. He has several crushes, some who break Go Young’s heart in various ways. There are quite a few scenes that take place in the bar, and the show is also not shy about showing gay sex scenes.

Intimacy is one of the big parts of the show to me. As it is adapted from a novel, I found some of the lines and dialogue to be quite poetic and literary, really honing in on Go Young’s voice as a writer as he narrates his own experience.

As we progress through the show as well we see some other major conflicts. This ranges from Go Young learning that he is HIV positive to his mother slowly dying in the hospital. There’s major friction between Go Young and his mother, who is religious and doesn’t agree with his sexual identity.

This is what sparks quite a bit of conflict between Go Young and his first lover: Sim Gyu-ho. Expectations are a huge burden for Go Young throughout his life, and when he comes to realize he needs to live for himself, especially on a trip to Thailand, it’s what opens doors for him.

Overall Thoughts

I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this drama, but was amazed by what we received. The acting is top level, the visuals are stunning, and it unfolds like visual poetry. It reminds me of What Comes After Love, which was another favorite show I watched recently (and reviewed on this blog).

Honestly, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the book, but this show blew me out of the water. I’m glad and sad it was only eight episodes, but I think if it was longer, it would lose some of the magic that made it extra special throughout its run time.

Anyways, I think if you’re interested in the show, definitely go watch it. Maybe don’t watch it in public if you’re queasy about someone seeing a gay sex scene (especially if you’re in a more conservative area), but I found most of what happened to be tasteful and not too fetishizing of gay men.

There’s found family, acceptance, and a lot of grief packed into such a short amount of time. I’ll be thinking about this for a while.

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