Rock My Heart
3rd German Film Week

film review

Two unlikely characters — a teenage girl with a congenital heart condition and an old man who used to be a horseracing star — meet in this feel-good, family drama that celebrates life amid adversity and misfortune. Seventeen-year-old Jana just wants to live her life away from doctors and hospitals, rebelling against her parents’ understandable insistence on her medications and surgeries. She becomes fascinated with Rock My Heart (or Rock, as she calls him), a stallion owned by Paul, a trainer living on a ranch nearby who is in fear of losing his house and property to the bank. Like Jana, Rock is rebellious and stubborn, but only she seems to calm and connect with him. A friendship develops between Jana and Paul, and as she grows interest in Rock, Paul trains her to ride him. An upcoming race with a huge cash prize becomes a goal and an inspiration for both of them, for Paul to help him keep Rock and his property as well as gain back his lost honour and self-confidence, and for Jana to prove to herself that she is more than her illness, that no one can stop her from fulfilling her dreams.

Rock My Heart delivers the heart-tugging schmaltz and inspiring Chicken Soup moments that one expects from a family drama which along the way also dovetails to become a coming-of-age story championing courage and individuality. It brims with optimism, the narrative carefully orchestrated to target an audience who does not assume things will go dark or awry, like those Hallmark TV specials that play on the weekends. It is a harmless, beautiful story, but also trite and forgettable because it does not try to do anything new. As typical of films like this, however, there is an obvious disregard for class issues, how it is taken for granted that happy endings that Jana’s story has are only possible because she comes from a family that is financially able, because she has loving parents and a nice boyfriend to support her. The mainstream hardly dwells on such things, preferring the luminous to the gritty, and as far as luminous moments are concerned, Rock My Heart surely has plenty.

- Richard Bolisay

Richard Bolisay is a writer and film critic based in Manila. His essays on cinema have appeared in various publications online and in print. He is a participant of the Berlinale Talent Press and Locarno Critics Academy, and has been part of the jury of, among others, the Hong Kong International Film Festival. 
Follow him on Twitter @richardbolisay.