[HanCinema's Film Review] "Petty Romance"

Jeong-bae (played by Lee Sun-kyun) is a serious comic artist, or tries to be, but his hard work is typically dismissed for being too borderline pornographic. His fellow comic artist friend Hae-ryong (played by Oh Jung-se) suggests Jeong-bae partner with a different writer to try and win an international contest. And so Jeong-bae meets Da-rim (played by Choi Kang-hee), a woman considerably more perverted than he is, with an explicitly pornographic concept that inexplicably meets with much stronger approval in the comic world.

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"Petty Romance" is at its best when this natural farce of a story plays out. The interview montage where Jeong-bae searches for collaborators is excellent clearly establishing both that most of Jeong-bae's applicants have no idea what the job actually is, and that Da-rim's ability to maintain a veneer of professionalism fools Jeong-bae into thinking she's way more mature than she really is. Da-rim bragging about translating the (abridged children's version) of Moby Dick pairs nicely with her picking silly fights with her twin brother Jong-soo (played by Song Yoo-ha) over which of them is the older twin.

There's a lot of intriguing commentary here about the South Korean cultural production here, produced immediately ahead of both the online webtoon boom as well as the development of modern blockbusters. Da-rim simply being vaguely adjacent to the world of English translation makes her an expert in a way Jeong-bae's actual study can't match up to. Watching this movie fourteen years later, there's an especially dark comic subtext about how people like Da-rim have basically taken over the industry.

Regrettably, "Petty Romance" is, as the title implies, chiefly a romance, and Jeong-bae and Da-rim inevitably become romantically entangled, with all the usual misunderstandings that follow from that. These cliches are frustratingly dull, and don't take advantage of the weird personalities of the lead characters anywhere near as much as they should. The closest we get to a payoff for that is a bedroom scene where Da-rim attempts to use all of her own terrible erotic advice to seduce Jeong-bae, succeeding only in perplexing him.

The main proof of concept for this film isn't the plot so much as it is the pairing of Lee Sun-kyun with Choi Kang-hee, who enjoyed some popularity from their appearance together in "My Sweet Seoul" back in the summer of 2008. There's no denying they have excellent chemistry. Jeong-bae and Da-rim on their own are quite obnoxious characters, but even each other quite a bit through their mutually annoying bickering.

There are also some reasonably interesting visual effects through the various animation sequences and how they get warped by the imaginations of the lead characters. Some of these are, indeed, explicitly pornographic to such an extent I'm a little surprised they weren't censored a bit more, since as edited, "Petty Romance" is only appropriate for adult audiences and is rated accordingly. But with a modestly successful box office record of two million admissions, "Petty Romance" still managed to do all right for itself.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Petty Romance" is directed by Kim Jeong-hoon-II, and features Lee Sun-kyun, Choi Kang-hee, Oh Jung-se, Ryu Hyun-kyung, Song Yoo-ha, Baek Do-bin. Release date in Korea: 2010/12/01.