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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
After watching Nam Dae-joong’s two films (The Last Ride, 2016; The First Ride, 2025), I find too many unformed thoughts suddenly swirling within me. On one hand, I think about how, although we know Koreans could be Olympians in the visceral experience of pain, they can still speak about everything in a lightened form where agony is tamed into bearable sadness. On the other hand, I reflect on how my Hungarian soul (perhaps in sync with the European one) has been socialized, even in a cultural sense, to expect tragedy to be tragedy—something to be spoken of only with solemnity, for if we do not approach it with sufficient weight, it loses its essential power. Yet here are the Koreans, wringing our insides for the umpteenth time, forcing us to burst out laughing in the moments of our deepest empathy. Naturally, we too know that tragedy and comedy are like Yin and Yang—inseparable, each carrying a small part of the other. Nevertheless, in our part of the world, we rarely succeed in producing the blend that we can masterfully experience once again in these two films.
The film's original title is "The Great Wish," which became
The Last Ride in
English, with all its nuances: the final journey, the last trip, the
ultimate mission. Interestingly, if we consider "ride" in a more literal
sense, the title latently refers to the true content of this "last round"—we
are confronted with an explicit scene even before the title credits: a young
man lying in a hospital bed ejaculates after a bit of fantasizing.
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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
The leaven of the story is friendship, just as it will be in the other, much
later film. Here, three young men are bound by this tie "from birth," a bond
that seems no longer strong enough to hold "the three musketeers" together
for much longer. From the offhand remarks of Gap-deok (Ahn Jae-hong)
and Nam-joon (Kim Dong-young) on their way to a hospital visit, it is
clear that these young men are in that stage of sexual maturation where
awakening physical desires occupy them significantly. However, they are not
yet adult enough to face the harsh reality of life that is about to take
their friend, Go-hwan (Ryu Deok-hwan), who suffers from incurable Lou
Gehrig's disease (ALS) and is approaching the end. The boys stumble through
their everyday lives, often appearing silly, until they finally grasp the
ungraspable. The immobile Go-hwan is surrounded by the desperate love of his
parents alongside that of his friends. Slowly, everyone begins to inquire
about the sick boy's wish that they could fulfill. Poor Go-hwan struggles
with his unspeakable, seemingly unachievable desire, which he deems better
to keep secret. Consequently, everyone tries to find the best way to immerse
the departing youth in the experience of real life one last time. These
actions, alongside the love and efforts of the "givers," are full of
catastrophes that provoke boisterous laughter; it is a miracle our patient
survives them at all. As a result of these ordeals, Go-hwan finally blurts
out to his buddies what he truly desires: he cannot die stuck in a state of
childhood; he longs for a real physical act to experience his manhood at
least once.
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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
Thus, the task falls to his friends to find a woman who can fulfill this wish. The two boys' Calvary begins, as they themselves are still minors, meaning their accessible connections in this area are limited. We get a deep look into how various people relate to their request, to them, and to their friend's illness. However, they stubbornly cross every boundary until they finally find solidary helpers among the male members of adult society. They reach their goal through genuine adventure-film trials, and in this process, we lack neither humor nor suffering.
Although it never shoves it in our faces, the film confronts us with the
parental problem: how well do we really understand our own child? Do we see
them as they truly are, or do we see what we want to see in them as our
"eternal child," as we experience with the mother (Jeon Mi-sun)? This
heightened life situation compels the father (Jeon No-min) to make a
decision that, even in its comicality, contains the necessity of rising
above conventional relations, as he is the one who, as a man, finally
understands how he can be of service to his son.
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(Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
Alongside Go-hwan, his friends are also part of the process of growing up
and becoming adults, in which they understand that departure is also a part
of life, and they must do something as long as the last green leaf still
flutters on the withered bonsai.
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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
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| (Author’s screenshot from The Last Ride.) |
The sequences filmed in the empty hospital ward are heart-wrenching. Writer-director Nam Dae-joong ensures that we, as viewers, laugh through our tears—with pain, yet with peace in our hearts. He who was forced to depart could do so with dignity, and those who remained continue to run the marathon of their lives.
. . .
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