Movies: On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate

The film is ostensibly about several days in the life of a not-very-successful stage and screen actor, Kyung-soo (Sang-kyung Kim), and about two romantic dalliances he has during that time. He’s failed to land a role in a major film, and is in something of a funk when an old friend of his calls and invites him out for a stay at his place in the country. Figuring he has nothing better to do, Kyung-soo heads out there, and before he knows it he’s getting sloshed and pawing prostitutes with his friend. He doesn’t understand women at all, not even as sex objects. If he could just use them cynically, at least then he would have a definition he could operate from, but he doesn’t even have that.

Kyung-soo and his friend bump into a woman while visiting a popular tourist spot, a dancer named Myung-suk. She is bright and talented, and she latches onto Kyung-soo with a ferocity that at first even the audience doesn’t see. Kyung-soo doesn’t know how to deal with such emotional directness except by freezing, or locking up. There’s one scene in particular where this is expressed wonderfully, where he stands on the shore of a lake on a gloomy day. His phone rings. It’s Myung-suk, waiting in her room for a man to come out and presumably have sex with her, and we (correctly) intuit that the whole reason she is making this call is to force Kyung-soo into springing into action. It does not happen, of course, and there is an even gloomier shot of him slogging back to his motel room in the rain. She understands him even less than he understands himself.

Then comes the second half of the movie, in which many of the revelations of the first half are put to work. On the train back home, Kyung-soo bumps into another girl, Seun-yong, who also takes an interest in him … but, again, in the hesitant, tentative way that real people do, as if she’s working against her better judgment. Kyung-soo returns her attention as best he can — which is to say, not very well, but at least he tries. Then she drops a bit of a bombshell on him: they were childhood friends, and she has been more or less harboring an admiration for him that hasn’t changed since then. The fact that he is an actor (how glamorous!) and quite good in bed to boot only cements her interest. The problem, of course, is that Kyung-soo is his own person — flawed, weak, what have you, but himself, not this image of him that she has.

Most films are not about life as we really experience it. They’re distillations, where we have people talking on the phone the minute they pick it up instead of listening for a moment or two first, or driving without really looking at the road in front of them. Turning Gate is built like a rebuke to all of that. When the characters sit and listen, they’re really sitting and listening, without all of the awkward pauses sliced out by a helpful editor. When they screw up, they screw up, and there’s no larger agent of the filmmaker’s will to swoop in and patch things up for them. It also means the characters have that much more freedom — freedom of speech, freedom to make their own mistakes, freedom to realize when they’re hitting a wall (or, as in this movie, a closed gate that turns one back).

There are many moments in Gate when the film simply watches without commenting or cutting, but never a moment when I felt this silence and space didn’t exist for a reason. The most important moments in the movie slide by so quietly that we might miss them if we blink. And because of that, a hard question is bound to come up: Are most people going to have the patience for a movie that seems so … well, passive? I’m going to stick my neck out a bit and say that I hope they can cultivate the patience. If they can do that for a two-hour film, then perhaps they can also do that for the rest of their own lives, for all those real-world moments when important things are passing them by without a sound.