Park Kun-young’s patient and deeply affecting drama about a young Korean sheepherder whose simple existence is upended by the appearance of his lover and twin sister is told with both painterly grace and visual subtlety. Jin-woo’s (Kang Gill-woo) spends his days in quiet contemplation, tending to the sheep and acting as a guardian to four-year old Seol (the precariously talented Kim Si-ha) on a small ranch in the mountainous Hwa-cheon county. The pair have formed an extended family unit with the kindly ranch owner Joong Man, his daughter (who has romantic designs on Jin-woo), and elderly mother who Seol affectionately calls “grandmother;” but this quiet sense of apparent normalcy is soon disrupted with the arrival of Jin-woo’s old college friend Hyun-min (Hong Kyung) and it is immediately apparent that there is a unspoken intimacy between the two men.
The queerness in A Distant Place is almost an incidental detail and intentionally subdued which is startlingly refreshing ground for an LGBTQ+ film in its favouring of implicit over explicit sexuality. Jin-woo and Hyun-min’s relationship is instead expressed through coded glances, charged silences, or sometimes even physical distances within the frame. When we do finally see a tender embrace between the two men during a secluded moment, it feels like an intrusion. This scene, beautifully lit and framed in a doorway, echoes the visual language of a filmmaker like Yasujiro Ozu and projects an ocean of feeling that is at once romantic and overwhelming. Park Kun-young is giving us a peep hole into a society where queer lives can not always be lived openly and freely.
The film is frequently punctured with other similarly graceful visual moments such as a breathtakingly romantic shot of the couple in silhouette against mountains and a purple-blue sky and the theme of distance — between queer and straight, life and death, parents and children, is slyly foregrounded both physically and psychologically in the use of expansive wide shots or the camera hovering from the perspective of Seol. The men have markedly different approaches to their queerness. Hyun-min is much more grounded, radically minded and accepting of his sexuality while Jin-woo is tightly-guarded like a coiled spring and not entirely comfortable with the situation. This conflict, between acceptance and resistance, is a dichotomy of the queer experience.
Hyun-min soon takes up a job teaching creative writing to adults at a local school and they settle into a form of domesticity. Seol even starts to address Jin-woo and Hyun-min as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and is a neat subversion of traditional family structures, suggesting the younger generation will be tolerant and accepting. Despite this momentary optimism, there is a growing sense of hushed hostility and homophobia from the local community as they realise the true nature of the men’s relationship. The sudden appearance of Jin-woo’s sister, and Seol’s mother, Eun-young (Lee Sang-hee) who has returned after a five-year absence and plans to take her daughter back to the city, adds a further volatile element to this compelling and complex family dynamic.
A Distant Place is unhurried, impressionistic filmmaking with richly detailed and textured performances. Jung-hoon Yang’s ravishing cinematography beautifully captures the landscape in all its cyclical, seasonal changes and shows that Jin-woo and Hyun-min’s love is as natural as the continued permanence of nature. When the third act momentarily slips into the realm of the supernatural, it risks disturbing the naturalistic tone, but it imbues the closing scenes of this quietly devastating and delicate drama with a sense of spiritual wonder and renewal.
