Kun-young Park | 정말 먼 곳 (Jeongmal Meon Gos) A Distant Place / 2020

an unforgiving landscape of beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kun-young Park (screenwriter and director) 정말 먼 곳 (Jeongmal Meon Gos) A Distant Place / 2020

 

This film begins in a kind of quietude of country life with a sheep rancher, Jin Woo (Kang Gil-woo) living on a ranch with his seeming daughter, Seol (Kim Si-ha). Woo works for Joong Min (Gi Ju-bong), a tolerant rancher who appreciates his employee’s hard work and is sensitive to the fact that his own daughter, Moon Kyeong is sexually attracted to him. Furthermore, Seol, kept from kindergarten school by his father, who feels it beneficial for her to remain in the natural world in which they exist, has a close relationship with Jin Woo’s own aging mother, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease who can best relate with Jin Woo’s lovely and totally innocent child.

   The relationships between these individuals, accordingly, are constantly changing as represented through the film in their dinner-time activities in a manner that might remind other Asian enthusiasts of Japanese director Yasuijrō Ozu’s great films. But this Korean film presents an even more complex situation when we soon realize that the loving, responsible Jin Woo is also gay, and that his lover Hyun Min (Hong Kyung), a teacher of poetry, arrives from Seoul in order to be with his beloved friend. And it is not only at the dinner table but in the child’s own relation to the landscape is rapidly changing.

     Both Joong Min and his daughter Moon Keyong quickly assimilate to the situation, perhaps even pretending, despite their own visual evidence, that it does not truly exist. The two men, moreover, quickly escape away for a truly bucolic relationship on an island retreat encampment. In fact, much of this film, with its beautiful countryside images that include both Seol and the grandmother, and the two lovers reveal the absolute delights of this world, despite what we soon recognize are the surrounding society’s dark limitations. The grandmother attempts a near-suicide as she disappears into the nearby woods. But she is eventually discovered and is brought back into this basically loving and accepting world of what one might describe as coherent and necessary relationships, the longing Moon Kyeong, the admiring older Joong Min, the links between the older grandmother and the young Seol, as well as the truly loving commitment of Jin Woo and Hyun Min. Indeed, this intensely loving private world might have continued on quite nicely, particularly since Hyun Min has now been hired as a quite popular poetry teacher—who unlike so many such professorial and teacher roles in US films which I find utterly unfamiliar and even hostile to my own teaching methods, seems to really have something to offer his mostly older students.

    Yet this “distant world” is soon visited by the serpent, Jin Woo’s twin sister, when Eun Young (Lee Sang-hee) enters the scene, demanding back the daughter Seol, who she has abandoned so many years earlier and has never before even bothered to visit.

     She has now resurrected her life, so she claims, found employment, and insists that she is finally ready to assimilate the young girl back into her life. Jin Woo is not at all assured by her declarations, and is generally troubled by her intrusion into what might be described as an idyllic life.

     The already strange gender and social relationships these people share—Seol describing Jin Woo as her “mommy,” are further tortured by the new “real” mother and her not-so-very-subtle intentions. Seol’s deep relationship with the grandmother is also put into jeopardy, as the old woman finally winds her way into death.

    Jin Woo is clearly not receptive to his twin sister’s attempt to “reclaim” a daughter who she’s basically abandoned, and Eun Young is not at all truly accepting of her brother’s sexual relationship with Hyun Min. In a terrible public expression of her anger, she destroys the gay couple’s possibility of maintaining a hidden love affair, and turns the entire rural community against her own brother, forcing the gentle and lovely Min out of his job and, basically, out of Jin Woo’s life.

     But even Eun Young also realizes that she can never replace the young Seol’s love for her “mommy,” as the two, finally, remain as a kind of warring couple in the “distant place” in order to provide protection to which Jin Woo remains, and from which his lover Hyun Ming has understandably retreated. The film ends in yet another adjustment that the always accepting and innocently loving Seol must yet again endure, even if she has now been cured of he female/male gender recognition of her loving father and her now returned mother.

     And soon after, Seol herself goes missing in the forest in search for the missing “grandmother” who has sustained her connection with the older generation.

     There is no true happiness to be found in the location in which both siblings and their child reside. It represents, rather, a truce, a world in which Jin Woo’s sexuality is put on permanent hold, an absolution for his sins of preferring a man in a world that that cannot comprehend his love.

     Park Kun-young’s film is a sad reflection of yet again another gay relationship not permitted by the society at large. Any kind of family connection, outside of heteronormative traditional values in this isolated world is basically rejected. A father’s love for his adopted daughter, an errant mother’s love for her previously rejected daughter, a gay lover who seeks a local farmer’s sexual commitment, even a woman’s secret admiration for a lonely farmer, a fatherly bond established between a hard-working employee, a lonely old woman’s love for a young girl and that young girl’s innocent love of the elderly woman are not permitted in this restrictive world of isolation. Love is a punishment for all those who do not fit into the narrow confines of a heterosexually-defined society. “A distant place,” despite its deep beauty, is not somewhere caring and loving people should want to commit their free-minded lives. Such a beautiful word is not a society of openness and forgiveness.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).