Road Movie

Once again, the press kit says, a movie about love. SukWon, a broker ruined in the latest market crash, sells his Rolex for hooch and collapses on the streets of Seoul. Disowned by his wife, he’s taken under the wing of DaeShik, once a celebrity mountaineer but now kingpin of a ramshackle community of winos and streetsleepers. DaeShik suggests a crosscountry trip together, a journey which brings them into contact with several other desperate men and women, including DaeShik’s abandoned wife and son and strungout waitress IlJoo, who falls hard for the exmountaineer. Naïve and unquestioning, SukWon takes weeks to realise that DaeShik brought him along because he loves him.Kim’s astonishing debut feature works on assumptions about love, pain and gay selfhatred which are certainly idiosyncratic, but also thanks to the film’s arresting look (long takes, natural light) and fearless performances highly credible. The story is rooted in East Asian social realities: it’s still ‘normal’ for gay men to marry and breed, regardless of the psychological damage to themselves and others. But the unrequited love thing is completely universal, and the same goes for a film that takes macho masculinity to the literal end of the road. Tony Rayns