My Love, Don’t Cross That River (2013)
Review of My Love, Don’t Cross That River / 님아, 그 강을 건너지 마오 (2014)
It was on my second day of my Mubi trial that I stumbled upon this movie, and, unaware and unprepared for what was come, I started watching it without reading the premise. Now I should’ve realized that this was going to be a very sad documentary from the title alone, but I was really naive when it came to this one. After eventually doing some research after sitting down and processing this documentary, pushing all the raging feelings to the side, it turns out that this was the most successful Korean documentary of all time. It’s a bittersweet one, marred by tragedy but captures devotion after seventy-six years. And if that ain’t true love, I don’t know what else is.
Let’s begin this review!
A couple married for seventy-six years must come to terms that one must die first.
From the opening shot of this documentary, we know something is amiss. The wife, Kang Kye-yeol, is lying in the snow in front of the river and full-on sobbing. We then transition back in time, where we see her happy with her husband of seventy-six years, Jo Byeong-man. Jo is now ninety-seven (in Korean years; in regular age he is actually ninety-five) and his wife is over a decade younger than him. At first, their story seems like a classic fairytale, a true love story where they will never be parted from each other. But then the cracks begin to fall.
We see how Jo has a lingering cough, one that gets worse as their lives progress forward. We see Kang’s birthday, one in which her own daughters begin to fight in front of her, leaving the elderly woman in tears. This is the stark wisdom that the happy couple seems to offer the camera earlier with their dog, which then dies.
Its carcass is shown on camera as Kang cries, saying it left the world too soon. In a documentary where we often see the couple framed in the same shot, in close proximity, this is where we begin to get solo shots of Kang. Visually we are being prepared for the inevitable: at the beginning of the film, Kang is the only one shown alive. We have no idea where Jo is, and as we see his health failing on camera, Kang keeps shrinking smaller and smaller in her individual shots.
I found this film interesting because the stories we get out of Korea tend to be centered around the capital city of Seoul, especially in Korean dramas, and this was a couple who has probably lived through the great tragedies of Korean history. And, somehow, their love and devotion to each other persevered just like their country. They still go around their town wearing hanbok, the traditional garb of Korean culture, and, despite them both being pretty old, tend to be getting around by walking pretty well.
Time tends to be something confusing in this film. As the husband, Jo, gets sick and seems to be on his deathbed, their son weeping over his sleeping body, we suddenly jump to three months in the future when he suddenly seems well. This is a jarring jump at first, something that’s supposed to set us up for the fact he’s going to die, but when I thought about it more I was really interested in this choice because of how it’s a bold decision.
You could show her nursing him back to health, but that wouldn’t allow the impact of his death to be as unsettling as it is. The only moments we see her confronting this truth while he’s alive is her begging to die with him, as well as when she burns clothes so he can take them to the afterlife. It’s a quiet but defiant acceptance of the situation at-hand, even if at the funeral she manages to save face for all the people around. It isn’t until she’s alone by his grave, at the river, when she finally starts to weep hysterically and burn more clothes for her husband.
I think, though, I wanted to see the focus outward at the entire family dyanmics more. The one daughter’s outburst at the birthday party is out of love, but we barely see anything of their kids or of their past. Who were Jo and Kang before the fact he ends up dead? I wanted to know more, almost selfishly, about their joy and moments of being alive, not just how it ended. I understand that a big point to this movie is about how love endures and life and death, but to get a landing point for this love would’ve also helped the viewer get a sense outside of just how they met. Love is hard, and we see that with his death, but how was it hard when alive?
Overall Thoughts
It’s a heartwarming documentary, that’s for sure. It gives you faith in the world and how people can truly love each other, even if it seems like it’s not possible. The documentary will also break your heart because of this, since we see how this love is splintered apart by mortality. I think it’s a decent documentary because of its subject and subject matter, but because it feels limiting to just this grand love story, I as a viewer wanted more from it. The emotional capabilities of it really hit hard, since I was sniffling at the end with Kang, but at the same time I just wanted more from it. So much was context was left out, and while we had the bare minimum of how they met, I just wanted a more holistic picture. But, alas, we did not get that.
