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