My Love, Don’t Cross That River paints an emotional portrait as devastating as life itself. Over a 15-month period, and in South Korea’s largest independent film endeavor, director Jin Mo-young intimately chronicles an enduring romance: Jo Byeong-man and Kang Kye-yeol have been married for 75 years.
Early scenes see the 89-year-old Kang and her 98-year-old husband fantastically alive and in love. The two reside in a secluded, modest home. They look after it together, giggling like children as one of them invariably turns shoveling or sweeping the drive into a snowball fight or an opportunity to shower the other in crisp leaves. Kang cooks for her husband; he sings for her on command; and the two gaze into each other’s eyes, exchanging tender compliments.
But a stark opening shot of Kang, weeping alone in a winter landscape, portends the bittersweet end. The immense and youthful adoration that the couple shares in life makes their looming separation all the more unbearable.
My Love, Don’t Cross That River lingers on simple, deliberate compositions, more photographic than cinematographic. The effect is to foreground Kang and Jo, fashioning a pure relationship portrait. To similar ends, the soundtrack is sparse (though, when employed, it rings innocently saccharine to American ears). Instead, the thick buzz of insects, crackle of fire, rustle of grass or babble of river water provides a natural soundscape over which the couple sings, laughs and weeps—expressions ultimately dampened by the persistent, wrenching cough that Jo develops.
Where Jo begins the film vigorous and strong, his health rapidly deteriorates before the camera.
The structure of the film takes up Jo’s own description of the stages of life: he bloomed like a flower in the spring; he withers now in winter.
While nothing short of death can weaken this couple’s bond, their love does not exist in isolation. On Kang’s birthday, for instance, her grown children bicker, nearly coming to blows over each other’s perceived mistreatment of their parents. Still, the consistent appearance of the various generations at the house—not to mention footage of the couple’s field trip on the senior center bus, in whose aisles the attendees dance and sing raucously—indicate that the South Korean cultural valuation of elder life ought to put the Western world to absolute shame.
Jin Mo-young is restrained in his filmmaking and humble in the face of life and death as embodied by Jo and Kang. An ongoing plotline finds Kang buying six pairs of long johns. Each is a belated gift for one of her children who died before the age of seven. She was too poor to purchase the clothing during their lifetimes. This narrative provides one of only a few details about the couple’s past. Some choice words from each of them imply the overall tone of their early marriage: their love was gentle, their circumstances difficult.
Jin’s framing devices are bare and quiet, lending them profundity. The couple mounts a mirror in their courtyard, and both are shot observing themselves in the glass. One of Jo’s beloved dogs passes away, while the other gives birth to a litter of puppies. As Jo lies incapacitated in bed, one of the little dogs compels a joyful smile—an increasingly rare occurrence as Jo weakens.
After Jo’s death, My Love, Don’t Cross That River circles back to its first, wintry landscape. Kang wails, a solitary figure in the snow, with no consolation except the promise that she will reunite with her husband in the afterlife. For the viewer, there is the feeling of having witnessed an ideal love, both intimate and universal.
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