This short feature (70 minutes) is part of MUBI’s current season of New Korean Cinema. It is presented as a ‘comedy’ but I suggest that is misleading for some audiences. I might have smiled at some point and I was prompted to think about a few things as I watched the film but mostly it left me cold. I admit that I’m probably not the target audience – perhaps I’m far too old to understand it. It was part of the London Film Festival programme and I’m grateful for the short introduction offered there and for the one other review I could find, on Eastern Kicks.
Heart is the third film by writer-director Jeong Ga-young. Following on from Lucky Chan-sil on MUBI, this seems to be another film that gets linked to the work of Hong Sang-soo, though in this case not directly but arguably as a film influenced by the more experienced director. Jeong plays a version of herself in the film, as what Kate Taylor on the BFI website describes as an ‘asshole film director’. She’s a 30 year-old young woman and the narrative is in two main parts. The first two thirds of the film presents an awkward encounter between Jeong and an art teacher played by Lee Seok-Hyeong. Some years earlier she slept with him around the time his wife was giving birth. Now she is considering an affair with another married man and seems to want to discuss her love life and ask his advice – or is this simply a ruse to play with the art teacher? In the midst of this rambling interconnection we are offered flashbacks to the earlier encounter between the two characters, including a couple of fantasy moments. In the final third of the film Jeong offers a kind of meta commentary in which she is now presented as the filmmaker before she was responsible for the earlier sequence as she interviews a young man (Choi Tae-Hwan) who could play the male role in a possible film.
Jeong presents herself as a young woman who seems to want everything her way and is aware of the contradictions in her behaviour. The film director in the second part of the film wants to make a film that will be screened at Cannes, but she doesn’t like Cannes because she’ll be uncomfortable getting drunk there. Her character in the first part of the film suggests that she pretends to be a young student to get concessions at the cinema box office, except when its an ‘R’ certificate when she wants to be seen as an older woman. The two reviewers I mentioned see Jeong as “clear-eyed and unsentimental” and that “young women [in the audience] will see a lot of truth in Ga-young” (both quotes from Tania Hall writing for Eastern Kicks). Kate Taylor suggests that Fleabag is a touchstone for the film alongside Hong Sang-soo. I’m all in favour of young women exploring their sexuality and discussing their moral codes if that’s what they wish to do and I can see that gleefully playing with male insecurity is something that could be an attractive proposition. The best sequence in the film for me was when the art teacher explains what you need to do and why, if you want to mount an exhibition of your work. The young woman wants to have an exhibition, even though she doesn’t seem to want to do the work or to have the talent.
Clearly, I struggled with Heart, but it’s good to have the MUBI season available and I will try some of the other titles.
The Case for Global Film 