| Overview: | A portrait of forgiveness, as an older blacksmith discovers he shares a secret past with a troubled young woman he meets on the road in rural Korea.
Road director Bae Chang-ho is one of contemporary Korean cinema's most prolific filmmakers, and this – his seventeenth film – is among his best work. A quiet, reflective study of aging and distant memories of choices and regrets, Road (which, appropriately, takes its name from Robert Frost's “Road Not Taken” poem) is subtle and unhurried in its approach, but the time spent with the film's two troubled and mismatched protagonists has a powerful cumulative emotional effect by the story's denouement.
Tae-suk is an older itinerant blacksmith plying his trade in 1970s rural Korea, traveling to various villages that increasingly have no need for his services. On the road in the dead of winter, he encounters Shin-young, who is journeying to her father's funeral. Soon the bitter Tae-suk realizes that this troubled young woman is actually someone intimately connected to Tae-suk's own past, and these memories uncover the heartbreak and betrayal that have tormented Tae-suk for twenty years. But in getting to know Shin-young, Tae-suk learns that these past events weren't exactly what he had assumed for all these years.
There is much to savor in Road, including the film's warmly nostalgic yet unsentimental portrayal of Korean rural life in the 1970s and the 1950s, but director Bae's poignant story is most impressive as a study in the necessity of forgiveness as a tool for personal growth and redemption. With great compassion, Bae illustrates the importance of accepting one's choices in life and moving towards a positive future.
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