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In recent years, indie films about North Koreans in the South have focused on the discrimination they face and how difficult it can be for them to integrate into South Korean society, not because of how different it is from everything they’ve known, but because the South doesn’t quite accept them. The problems of the hero of 3670 are, however, two-fold in that he is also gay and finding it difficult to straddle both communities while looking for companionship.
The opening scene finds him having sex with a guy from a dating app in a darkened room, but as soon as they’re finished, his partner gets up to shower and insists on leaving, refusing Cheol-jun’s (Cho You-hyun) invitations to get dinner and clearly uninterested either in friendship or romance. He asks him where he’s from, and on figuring out he’s from the North, rolls his eyes a little asking if he doesn’t have any gay friends yet. Cheol-jun doesn’t have any South Korean friends at all, let alone gay ones, and has never met any other gay people who left North Korea. He’s never disclosed the fact that he is gay to his North Korean friends or aunt living in the South who is his only familial link, which leads to moments of accidental insensitivity when his friends push him to date a North Korean girl they mistakenly think is interested in him, and his aunt tells him to settle down and get married in the South as his parents would have wanted him to.
The film seems a little ambivalent about Cheol-jun’s third community which is the Church. While it might be as Cheol-jun says helpful in a lot of ways in giving him something to belong to and helping with things like scholarship applications, it’s somewhat exploitative in that their help is obviously conditional on Cheol-jun accepting their religious beliefs which are otherwise in conflict with desire to find freedom as a gay man. Cheol-jun sometimes picks up extra money speaking at Church events in which he outlines how grateful he is to have been “saved” by the grace of God which brought him to the South away from the Godless North. Unlike other similarly themed films, 3670 doesn’t tread any further into how those from the North can be almost fetishised and exploited for their stories, but it is clear that that the Church is also using him to further their own aims. On the advice of his hookup date, Cheol-jun ends up attending a mixer for gay men which he keeps secret from his North Korean friends where he meets Yeong-jun (Kim Hyeon-mok), a gay man of the same age who lives in his area and shops at the convenience store where he has a part-time job, and later gets him a paying gig speaking about his salvation at his church.
Yeong-jun’s mother is a deaconess, and it seems that, in some ways, Yeong-jun is even less free that Cheol-jun who is beginning to discover a new kind of freedom as he introduces him to the gay scenes in Jogno and Itaewon. He views himself as inferior because he doesn’t believe himself to be conventionally attractive and has been having trouble passing the interview process to get a job (possibly those two things are somewhat connected in his mind). Yeong-jun also hasn’t said anything to his mother about being gay and sometimes goes to church to placate her even though he thinks there’s no place for him there as a gay man with the rather repressive religion that his mother practices. When he gets a job and is fully independent, he plans to stop attending church, making clear that for him, as a gay man in a capitalistic society, his freedom rests in financial security and achieving socially defined success by joining the workforce.
The fact that’s capitalism to which Cheol-jun must adjust himself is echoed in his advisor’s advice that he needs to market himself and give the university he’s trying to apply to a reason to choose him over another candidate. When he becomes a member of Yeong-jun’s friendship group, they also tell him that he needs a “selling point”, which they think should be his North Koreanness. But in an odd way, these ironic words of advice do lead to him becoming more at home with himself even if he’s also still caught between these two communities. With his North Korean friends, he dresses in a dowdier style, but puts on fashionable clothes and a university baseball cap to hang out in queer spaces with Yeong-jun. He tells his North Korean friends that he’s going to visit his aunt while occasionally blowing them off to see his gay friends, making it clear that he cannot exist simultaneously in both spaces as a North Korean and as a gay man.
But as much as Cheol-jun begins to find himself, Yeong-jun founders. Cheol-jun overhears some of his gay friends making fun of him for his North Koreanness and suggesting they only hung out with him out of pity, robbing him of this new community through spite and bitchiness rooted in a series of misunderstandings along with the social dynamics within the gay community and the friendship group itself. Nevertheless, when he does actually meet another North Korean man through the hook-up app, he helps him accept himself too by introducing him to these queer spaces in much the same way Yeong-jun did and showing him that it’s alright and it’s not as difficult or frightening to inhabit these spaces as he might have assumed it to be.
Cheol-jun finds freedom here, at least much more freedom than he would have in the North. He’s not in the same kind of danger. But even many of the men in Yeong-jun’s friendship group are closeted and live as “straight” men, keeping quite about their private lives and restricting their authentic selves to Itaewon and Jogno, much as Cheol-jun keeps his North Korean and gay selves separate until he eventually decides to confide in some of his friends and finds them unexpectedly supportive because like him they too are here in search of happiness. The title of the film comes from a code Yeong-jun’s friends use to organise meetups hinting at their clandestine nature and desire to avoid inviting outsiders into their secure community. Cheol-jun, by contrast, is now free to wear his trendy clothes with his North Korean friends and to be open and unguarded in either community, effectively eliding the division between the two. Though his relationship with Yeong-jun who evidently meant a lot to him and changed his life in many ways may have been disrupted by the societal realities of the South from lookism not just in the gay community but the wider society to conventional definitions of success and entrenched homophobia along with the way they impact on a man like Yeong-jun, Cheol-jun has perhaps discovered a home for himself and a kind of freedom in his life as a gay North Korean man in the South.
3670 screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 