Doc Corner: 'My Love' a Romantic Gem
Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 10:20AM Glenn here with our weekly look at documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. We're a bit late this week due to internet problems, but we're here now looking at the fan favourite hit, My Love, Don't Cross That River.
The opening shot of Jin Mo-young’s My Love, Don’t Cross That River is one of breathtaking beauty. An elderly woman sits at a grave, the ground and trees covered in snow, her crying a distinctive cut of a knife through the serene nature. If this were a fiction film, people would crow about how artfully it is composed and how even without knowledge of its subject or circumstances it is able to immediately create wells of emotion in the audience. By the time Jin’s film returns to this tableau some 80 minutes later, it does so with the complete story behind it and if the reserved simplicity of it had somehow alluded the viewer in its opening moments then surely the impact will well and truly be made now.
My Love is a film about a marriage. Jo Byeong-man is 98 and Kang Gye-Yeol is 89, and the pair who met when she was just 14 have been married for 76 years. Without that opening shot foreshadowing events to come, one might struggle through the opening half of Jin’s movie which captures the pair in almost unbearably cute form as they play child-like games while doing yard work, wear matching colourful silk outfits on day trips, pick flowers, and take care of their dogs (one of which is named Freebie because, well, he was free). But when Jo becomes increasingly sick, the film takes on a deeper resonance as Kang must confront the inevitability that she will be alone for the first time in nearly eight decades.
