Well-known director Jang Jin reached a milestone in 2011 with the production of his 10th feature film. Having been active in both film and theatre circles since his debut in 1998, Jang is known for a particular style of comedy: a distinctive blend of understated wit and melodramatic pathos, of reflective calm followed by madcap bursts of cacophony.
He particularly delights in upending our ordinary conception of people and things, for example in his unusually heartfelt portrait of a band of assassins in Guns & Talks (2001), or in highlighting the hidden emotional lives of top politicians in Good Morning President (2009). His distinctive style can be hit or miss at the box office (Romantic Heaven was a miss), but his influence extends wide. In a recent Cine21 poll of Korean film students, which asked respondents to identify their role models in the local film industry, Jang placed third (6.2%) behind Bong Joon-ho (10.5%) and Park Chan-wook (10%).
This new film finds Jang in a particularly reflective mood, perhaps because it was the first screenplay he wrote after settling down and getting married. It’s a film about dying, but in a characteristic reversal he shoots it from a particularly sweet and earnest perspective. It’s a look at death through rose-colored glasses.
Romantic Heaven tells several stories at once, although the various characters all occupy more or less the same space, and sometimes interact with each other. Part one, “Mom,” focuses on the character of Mimi, played by promising debut actress Kim Ji-won. Mimi’s mother is battling cancer, and needs a bone marrow transplant if she is to have any hope of surviving. With great difficulty, doctors identify a potential donor, but then the man goes into flight after being accused of murder. Hoping to find him, Mimi becomes acquainted with the police detectives assigned to his case.
Part two, “Wife,” concerns a lawyer named Min-gyu who has recently lost his spouse. Amidst his grief, he is distracted by the fact that he can’t find a bag that she had brought with her to the hospital, and which contained her personal diary. In the meantime, he is visited by an ex-convict who has a score to settle.
Part three, “Girl,” focuses on Ji-wook, a taxi driver whose grandfather is on the verge of death. One day his grandmother tells him that for all of his life, her husband has been unable to forget a young woman he met in his youth.
It is in part four, “Romantic Heaven,” that the various threads are brought together and ultimately resolved. Sometimes in multi-strand stories of this type you can sense the hand of the director in tying up loose ends, but in this film God himself appears and pulls a few strings. Dressed in a white suit and portrayed in typically classy style by veteran actor Lee Soon-jae, God is not what you might expect for an all-powerful being, and neither is heaven.
One of the most striking aspects of this film is the creative depiction of the afterlife, bathed in white but otherwise much simpler and more approachable than you might expect. (It compares favorably with Peter Jackson’s conception of heaven in The Lovely Bones, with its fantastic landscapes and blinding colors that paradoxically drain the realm of any feeling.) In the end, what you remember most from Romantic Heaven is not the climax of the various stories, which are resolved perhaps too neatly and sweetly to give the work any true sense of gravity, but rather the imaginative and good-natured metaphysics of the film. It strikes you as a pretty good place to die, or else merely to inhabit for a couple hours.
Darcy Paquet