Andrew Farrell on a popular South Korean film with a universal message
There aren’t many movies that better chart South Korea’s dramatic social developments over the past 50 years than the much-loved 2002 drama The Way Home.
Lee Jeong-hyang’s classic tale of a spoilt seven-year-old boy from the fast-paced concrete jungle of Seoul, who is sent to live with his frail grandmother deep in the Korean countryside, might not be one of the most recognisable films from this peninsula to have graced foreign cinemas, but it is immensely popular and respected over here.
Movies of this nature – a clash of cultures in the same country and the great divide between old and modern, urban and rural are the key storylines here – are shot in most countries, as writers and directors look to play on the emotions of their audiences with charming plots that always have a happy ending, and often elicit a tear or two along the way.
As such, you can always guess the storyline before it unfolds: little brat hates grandmother, she shows patience and resilience, child begins to care for old lady, happy ending. So it’s how the direction and acting keep the audience interested that makes the difference.
Lee Jeong-hyang’s film is a masterclass in this, helped by two brilliant actors, Kim Eul-boon (the grandmother) and Yoo Seung-ho (the boy, Sang-woo). Both stars were making their movie debuts in the film but at completely different points in their lives – Kim Eul-boon in her ’70s, while Yoo Seung-ho was born in 1993 (and on the basis of this evidence, must be one of the finest child-actors of his generation).
The grandmother is typical of the rural ladies you see in South Korea, left behind by a society that is modernising at a frantic pace. Her home, a tiny shack that wouldn’t look out of place in the slums of Rio, is nestled in the beautiful mountains of Gyeongsangbuk province on the eastern seaboard.
She has no running water, which invariably means painful treks over jagged hills to get a fresh supply, and her bathroom is a bucket kept outside. She is brutally hunchbacked from decades of toiling in the fields growing rice and lifting heavy materials on her back.
The grandmother is also illiterate and dumb, but not deaf.
Her daughter, who appears only fleetingly in the movie to drop off and later collect Sang-woo, is a beautiful 32-year-old, unemployed and single, saddled with debts from a poor business venture. She leaves Sang-woo with her mother so she can find work.
Sang-woo himself is a brat who treats his grandmother with the sort of disdain and malice that many Koreans fear are growing in their society. Korean is an honorific language with a grammar that functions on hierarchy and a society that respects the elderly with great regard. But times are changing, and that’s part of the picture The Way Home is painting.
The film can be watched in full on the video site YouTube (tinyurl.com/dyawr49) and is definitely worth seeing, especially for those with a keen interest in Korean culture. It has moments of both laughter (the chicken scene is a hoot) and real poignancy that will appeal to most audiences.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
