The Road to the Race Track

Cinema is a cerebral art form. Great cinema is not passive; it requires the active participation of the viewer to succeed. No matter how beautiful, or clever, or breathtaking a movie is, if it doesn't engage your mind, it may be great entertainment, but it can not be called a success on an artistic level. While The Road to the Race Track (경마장 가는길, 1991) has a number of flaws that keep me from being able to declare it a great work, one of them is not that it fails to stimulate the grey matter, and it can be recommended on that basis.

The plot, to the extent that this film has one, can be summarized quite easily. Having spent the last five years studying in France, "R" (Moon Sung-keun) returns to his native Korea, and is met at the airport by "J" (Kang Su-yeon) who seems somewhat less than excited to see him. R and J were lovers in France, having lived together for three and a half years until J's own return to Korea a year earlier. R clearly wants to dive back into what clearly was an intensely sexual relationship, but J is resistant. Confused and angered by her reaction, R dutifully treks to Daegu to visit his family, which we are surprised to learn includes a wife (Kim Bo-yeon) and two small children, but evinces little interest in remaining there. R quickly returns to Seoul and to J, and spends the remainder of the film attempting to rekindle their relationship. His methods, which range from smarmy to brutal, are at all times emotionally abusive, raising the question of why J keeps coming back for more. One reason is that R, who both parties agree ghost-wrote J's doctoral dissertation, has published a piece of literary criticism in Korea under her own name that was actually R's work. When he finds this out, R wastes no time in devising ways to use this fact as blackmail. R's wife refuses to grant R his divorce, a fact which J uses as an excuse to maintain a distance; R's marital status was not an issue when they were in France, but "this is Korea." J goes so far as to agree to marry another man who she has been seeing since her own return to Korea, but whether this is a serious relationship or just a threat to hold over R's head is an open question, the answer to which seems to change from moment to moment.

That this warring couple seems to be moving in circles, both emotionally and temporally, is not unintentional. Writer Ha Il-ji and director Jang Seon-woo attempted to express what they saw as a crisis of values in postmodern Korean society, and the circularity (or lack of progress) is a result of that moral breakdown. (For more analysis along these lines, see the KOFA page on this film, part of the "100 Korean Films" series.) It can be hard to know how much circularity is enough, however, and as a result I think this film could have survived about 20 minutes of judicious cuts. One scene in particular, involving R's attempts to remove a sash around J's waist, is both much too long and clumsily arranged.

This film perhaps could be seen as a Hong Sang-soo film with a much darker tone, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Hong was influenced by it. (KOFA) A more tangible connection to Hong's films is in the casting of Moon, who will be familiar to many viewers from his performance in Hong's Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. Here he brings to life a character that is at once charming, reprehensible, and sympathetic, no mean feat. Across the table from Moon is Kang Su-yeon, one of the greatest actresses of her era and among the very first Korean performers to achieve international recognition; she won Best Actress awards for her roles in Im Kwon-taek's films The Surrogate Womb (Venice, 1987) and Come, Come, Come Upward (Moscow 1989).

The film is presented in a 16x9 enhanced 1.85:1 (really 1:78) format, with a stereo soundtrack in the original Korean, and both are fine. Subtitles are at about the same level as the previous few discs in this series; an example is provided at left. When he says "look me down," he means "look down on me." Similar problems with idiomatic expressions crop up with relative frequency (her response is "When the hack did I look you down?"), but they are easily overcome. Extra features are restricted to a trailer, poster, photo gallery, and a (Korean) filmography for the director and two leads. The disc is produced by Spectrum DVD, whereas the others in this series are all Taewon, but this doesn't seem to matter to the generally high quality of the presentations.