Crossing: brief notes on...

Details: Category: Diary

I'm not sure what to call this category any more... “Brief notes”? “Bottom line”... “nutshells”.

In any case, a few words about Crossing, which I saw a while back already. First of all, considering how this film was picked up as Korea's national entry for the foreign-language category (didn't go as planned, as everyone knows), it seems natural that expectations would be quite high for this family melodrama set in North Korea. Well, let's just say that Crossing doesn't quite deliver, story-wise. Visually, the film is more than decent: mise-en-sc ène, cinematography, etc.

Director Kim Tae-kyun, who helmed the martial-arts anime-ish action flick Volcano High (2001), deals with considerably heavier material here, and seems to struggle to keep the narrative afloat. Awkward subject-matter? Maybe...

Devoted family man Yeong-su (Cha In-pyo), once a soccer champion and now a coal miner living in dismal conditions, takes a dangerous trip across the border to find medicine in China for his pregnant, tuberculosis-stricken wife. Unfortunately (yes of course) Yeong-su gets shuttled to a German embassy in the process, and ends up forcibly removed to South Korea (into the bargain), where he finds himself cast as a “refugee”, far from his beloved family.

His starving 11-year old son, Joon (Shin Myeong-cheol), undertakes a journey to join his father in China but is captured and placed in a horrific re-education camp, where the most harrowing scenes of the film take place.

For some reason, I thought the film would focus more on the son and his odyssey. In other words, I had an almost entirely different film in my head before watching Crossing (not a good thing), something like a Korean version of Spielberg's Empire of the Sun perhaps. That wasn't really it, though. My loss, I suppose, since other people seem to have enjoyed it. To me, this was hardly more than a very weepy melo. that just happens to take place in the DPRK.