Translated material
Grandma's grandson
“The Road Home” on Moscow screens
Seven-year-old Sun Woo is sent by his exhausted mother to the village to live with his grandmother. Grandmother lives alone: mute, illiterate, bent over the years into a slowly moving hook, a comma before a quick final ellipsis. Sun Woo grew up in the city, his small and greedy world consists of fast food, postcards with Transformers and a pocket computer game, which with its alien liquid crystal gurgling disturbs the original silence of the countryside. The game's batteries are running out - grandma can't buy new ones for her grandson. And instead of fried pieces of American chicken, he cooks an unusual fragrant soup from the hard-earned corydalis. But she can give Sang Woo something else.Smooth, soothing, soft light pours from the screen without any additional batteries. Director Lee Jung-Han (who made his debut with the 1998 romantic comedy Zoo Art Museum) has made a film that, like a matchbox with a firefly inside, you can hide in your pocket. It is completely unlike the expensive and very high-quality Americanized toys for which recent South Korean cinema is rich and famous. And it won’t become a sensation (although it achieved some kind of festival fate last year, including a special mention by the jury in San Sebastian). This movie is absolutely obvious and transparent - sometimes even a little more than we would like. It lacks the heady feeling of a universal vacation, which turned into an explosion of absolute happiness in Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro, which in many respects is indeed very similar to The Road Home. The film has no direct relation to the modern film context at all (even seventy-eight-year-old Kim Al-Bun, who played the grandmother, has never been to a movie in her life). But it can also remind you of almost forgotten films, to which “The Road Home” seems most similar. To films for children and youth, shot twenty or thirty years ago at film studios of the then-union Central Asian republics. They appeared in certain quantities in the summer vacation television program closer to August, when the limit of obligatory television entertainment (from “Guest from the Future” to “Captain Vrungel”, prescribed daily in homeopathic doses), was exhausted. Then the stories about the Akmals and Alpamys who came on vacation, bare-legged, in skullcaps and with twigs in their hands, who learned to see beauty in a dew drop, rode races on bicycles and found friends of the same age on the banks of muddy irrigation ditches, were perceived almost through force, as unloved, but the inevitable “first” in the dacha diet. Young hearts craved urban adventure, suitcase boys and rounded Disney flourishes. And here are some irrigation ditches, butterflies and skullcaps. But time has passed - and there are as many Disney as you like, and films about holidays in the village have sunk into nothing: they won’t write letters, and it’s unlikely that they’ll call. To unexpectedly appear again, now under the label of oriental arthouse.