{"id":5075,"date":"2020-08-30T19:22:37","date_gmt":"2020-08-31T02:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5075"},"modified":"2020-09-20T07:29:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-20T14:29:00","slug":"korea-blog-no-sex-please-this-is-the-korea-of-jang-sun-woos-the-road-to-the-race-track-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5075","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: No Sex Please, This Is the Korea of Jang Sun-woo\u2019s The Road to the Race Track (1991)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Since the liberalization of international travel<\/a> in 1989, Koreans abroad have become a more than occasional subject of Korean cinema. My own favorite example remains Hong Sangsoo\u2019s Night and Day<\/em> (\ubc24\uacfc \ub0ae), from 2008, about a boorish artist in Parisian exile from a drug charge. But then, Hong\u2019s films \u2014 modestly budgeted, dialogue-heavy, and improvisatory in construction, celebrated at European festivals (most recently in Berlin this year, where he won the Silver Bear for Best Director) and routinely compared to the work of European auteurs \u2014 are in some sense foreign themselves. But they aren\u2019t entirely without precedent: for the Korean movie that first found all of its substance in the dissimulating conversations and abortive sexual encounters of half-formed intellectuals, we must look to Jang Sun-woo\u2019s The Road to the Race Track<\/em> (\uacbd\ub9c8\uc7a5 \uac00\ub294 \uae38).<\/p>

The Road to the Race Track <\/em>came out in 1991, five years before Hong\u2019s debut feature The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well <\/em>(\ub3fc\uc9c0\uac00 \uc6b0\ubb3c\uc5d0 \ube60\uc9c4 \ub0a0). What the films have in common begins with their origins in literary source material, once almost a matter of course in Korean cinema. They also both involve journeys from Seoul out to smaller provincial cities and back, and both of them spend time in caf\u00e9s and motels. But when describing the Korea of the early 1990s, in the capital or elsewhere, the English words for those places don\u2019t suffice: much more evocative, for anyone who knows this country, to say that these movies time in dabang<\/em> and yeogwan<\/em>. The two main characters in Jang\u2019s film use those very terms with some frequency, commenting in certain lines on how they seem to go nowhere else.<\/p>

In fact there are practically no characters but those two, called only R and J. R, a bespectacled, jacketed and necktied academic in his late thirties, exits baggage claim at Gimpo Airport to meet J, a woman in her mid-twenties with a bouncy late-80s perm, set somewhat apart by a faintly Continental style of dress. And indeed, both have spent time on the Continent, specifically France: R has just returned from half a decade earning his doctorate in literature there, a task J herself completed the year before. For three years of their overlapping time abroad they lived together as lovers, yet when J drives R to his yeogwan \u2014 like a motel but smaller, cheaper, and somehow both garish and spartan \u2014 she makes to leave as soon they arrive, puzzling R with her reluctance to pick up in Korea where they\u2019d left off in France.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the liberalization of international travel in 1989, Koreans abroad have become a more than occasional subject of Korean cinema. My own favorite example remains Hong Sangsoo\u2019s Night and Day (\ubc24\uacfc \ub0ae), from 2008, about a boorish artist in Parisian exile from a drug charge. But then, Hong\u2019s films \u2014 modestly budgeted, dialogue-heavy, and improvisatory in construction, celebrated at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5075"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5109,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5075\/revisions\/5109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}