# The Road to the Racetrack (경마장 가는 길)
**The Road to the Racetrack** (경마장 가는 길) is a 1991 South Korean film directed by Jang Sun-woo, adapted from the novel of the same title by Ha Il-ji and starring Kang Soo-youn, Moon Sung-keun, Kim Bo-yeon, and Yun Il-ju.[1](https://journal.kci.go.kr/kolali/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART001660911) It is regarded as a pioneering attempt in Korean realist cinema and has generated varied interpretations and debate.[2](https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/1223_201811301600063306)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | 1991[1](https://journal.kci.go.kr/kolali/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART001660911) |
| Director | Jang Sun-woo[1](https://journal.kci.go.kr/kolali/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART001660911) |
| Source | Novel *The Road to the Racetrack* by Ha Il-ji[1](https://journal.kci.go.kr/kolali/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART001660911) |
| Cast | Kang Soo-youn, Moon Sung-keun, Kim Bo-yeon, Yun Il-ju[1](https://journal.kci.go.kr/kolali/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART001660911) |
| Standing | Evaluated as a pioneering attempt in Korean realism cinema[2](https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/1223_201811301600063306) |
| Streaming | Added to Netflix on January 20, 2023, in collaboration with the Korean Film Archive[3](https://v.daum.net/v/20230123134801275) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
R (Moon Sung-keun) lands in Seoul after five and a half years of study in France. Waiting at the airport is J ([Kang Soo-yeon](https://www.edgepedia.org/kang-soo-yeon)), his lover of three and a half years in Paris. R has decided, more or less, to abandon his wife (Kim Bo-yeon), his children, and his extended family back home and build a life with J. Instead of letting that happen, J books them into a yeogwan, a motel, and then fends off every attempt he makes at sex. She will share the room, the meals, the car rides, and the conversation, but not the bed.
So begins a long, looping journey toward R's hometown, a road trip in which the destination keeps receding. The two drift from motel to motel and from dabang to dabang, coffee houses where they sit for hours over cups and argue. R wants an explanation for J's coldness and wants her body; J wants, apparently, nothing except to keep him talking and wanting. She is evasive, ironic, and always one step ahead of him. He is a man with an answer for everything, including his own humiliation, and the film lets his fluency curdle into self-parody. Looking around the capital, he asks, "Is this the Seoul with the 600-year history? It's peppered with crosses. It feels like I've entered a huge European cemetery."[9](https://letterboxd.com/colinmarshall/film/the-road-to-the-racetrack/)
The talk is not only about love. The intellectual debts between them run deep and crooked. R wrote J's Ph.D. thesis for her because she lacked the ability, and she then rewrote it, published it under her own name, and later admitted her version was not as good as his original.[10](https://jeremycprocessing.com/the-road-to-the-race-track/) She goes further, entering a literary-magazine contest with a piece cobbled together out of R's work, and wins a prize for it. Her only real talent is plagiarism; everything else about her intellectual life is borrowed, which is exactly how R begins to see her love.[9](https://letterboxd.com/colinmarshall/film/the-road-to-the-racetrack/)
**The line everyone remembers comes in the middle of one of these motel-room standoffs, when R demands an explanation for J's behavior and asks, "What is the ideology of your actions?"** The absurdity is the point: he reaches not for a word of feeling but for the Konglish intellectual fashion term idaeollogi, treating a woman's refusal of sex as a thesis to be defended. The mismatch between the running sexual grudge match and the seminar-room vocabulary made the line a pop-culture catchphrase in Korea for years afterward.[9](https://letterboxd.com/colinmarshall/film/the-road-to-the-racetrack/)
The trip finally reaches its destination, and the film's last movement turns on a bitter reversal. After all the resistance, J gives in to R's physical advances, and the reconciliation they have circled for two hours collapses almost immediately once it is achieved. The thing both of them supposedly wanted turns out to be unlivable the moment they get it, and the relationship ends not with a decision but with exhaustion.[10](https://jeremycprocessing.com/the-road-to-the-race-track/) The film closes at the racetrack of the title, with the horses running while the humans, who spent the entire film standing still and talking, have nothing left to say.
### Characters
R (Moon Sung-keun) is a returning scholar, a man who has spent nearly six years in Paris and more than three of them with J, and who arrives in Korea prepared to throw away his marriage on the strength of that affair. He is articulate, self-justifying, and helpless, a professor who can analyze everything except his own refusal to commit. Moon plays the gap between the fluency and the emptiness without ever winking at the audience.
J (Kang Soo-yeon) is R's Paris lover, an aspiring literary critic who plagiarized her way into a career and now holds all the cards in their relationship. She rebuffs R again and again, and Kang plays her not as a victim or a romantic object but as someone who understands R better than he understands himself and has decided that understanding is not enough. Kang later named this one of the films she was most proud of.[11](https://www.fareastfilm.com/eng/archive/2023/the-road-to-the-racetrack/?IDLYT=15535)
R's wife (Kim Bo-yeon) waits at the end of the road with the children and the extended family, the ordinary life R is ready to discard and the one the film quietly keeps in view.
### Interpretations and controversies
The film was born in a censorship fight. Its sexually explicit dialogue drew the attention of the censors, and Moon Sung-keun personally visited the censors' office and gave an angry defense of the work, which succeeded in getting their demands lifted. Press coverage of the controversy, along with critics calling the film "pornographic," did the box office no harm at all.[11](https://www.fareastfilm.com/eng/archive/2023/the-road-to-the-racetrack/?IDLYT=15535)
The ending has been argued over ever since. Some critics, notably in a later English-language reappraisal, object that the script's final turn implies women enjoy and welcome rough physical coercion as a route to fulfillment, a reading they find indefensible even while praising Kang's fearless performance in the scene.[10](https://jeremycprocessing.com/the-road-to-the-race-track/) Defenders at the time argued the film depicted the destruction of Korean society's overall morality; opponents called it a botched work without message or style, and the defense ultimately prevailed in the critical debate.[12](https://extmovie.com/movietalk/93380500)
## Source novel and adaptation
The film adapts Ha Il-ji's novel *The Road to the Racetrack* (하일지, 『경마장 가는 길』). In Korean literary criticism the novel has been evaluated as Korea's first postmodernist novel, and scholarship on 1990s Korean cinema's eroticism places Jang Sun-woo's films at the boundary between modernism and postmodernism.[4](https://journal.kci.go.kr/djnar/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART002167602) The title also appears in Korean literary studies as a subject in its own right, in analyses of the closed society's "road" alongside Yi Che-seon's "A Day of Novelist Gu Bo."
## Reception and significance
YTN's retrospective on Korean film classics describes the film as a pioneering attempt in Korean realism cinema that drew varied interpretations and debate, and notes that it follows the push-and-pull of an affection game between the two lead characters, played by Moon Sung-keun and Kang Soo-youn, throughout the film.[2](https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/1223_201811301600063306)
**Place in Jang Sun-woo's career.** In the Korean Film Archive's selection of 100 representative Korean films, Jang Sun-woo is described as having drawn the affairs of lower-class married men and women humorously in *Love Triangle* (1990), and then, with *The Road to the Racetrack* (1991), *To You, from Me* (1994), and *Lies* (1999), dismantled the status of intellectuals and artists and exposed consciousness, becoming a subject of controversy.[5](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/upload/webzine/1f34f3c5-16e7-4043-8e24-07b21f7603af.pdf)
For Moon Sung-keun, the 1991 film alongside Kang Soo-youn made his name known in Chungmuro, the Korean film industry; his breakthrough performance came later in Jang Sun-woo's *Petal* (1996).[6](https://seore.org/raw/%EB%AC%B8%EC%84%B1%EA%B7%BC)
**Influence.** [Hong Sang-soo](https://www.edgepedia.org/hong-sang-soo), after seeing the film, liked that such a film existed in Korea and has continued to make films using "difference and repetition," a formal device associated with *The Road to the Racetrack*, which differs markedly in form from earlier Korean films.[7](https://photohistory.tistory.com/19565)
## Later availability and commemoration
On January 20, 2023, Netflix began streaming *The Road to the Racetrack* and *Sibaji* in collaboration with the Korean Film Archive, timed to the release of Kang Soo-youn's final film *Jung_E*, describing the two titles as representative works that had previously been difficult for viewers to access.[3](https://v.daum.net/v/20230123134801275) In May 2023 the film opened the first-anniversary memorial retrospective for Kang Soo-youn (1966–2022) at Megabox Seongsu, followed by a conversation event with director Jang Sun-woo and actor Moon Sung-keun, moderated by Kim Hong-jun, director of the Korean Film Archive.[8](https://v.daum.net/v/20230503211813206?f=p)
## References
1. [소설과 미디어콘텐츠의 상호매체성 (filmography listing 하일지의 『경마장 가는 길』, 장선우 감독, 1991), KCI journal](https://journal.kci.go.kr/kolali/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART001660911)
2. [[한국영화 걸작선] '경마장 가는 길', YTN (2018)](https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/1223_201811301600063306)
3. [故 강수연 '씨받이' '경마장 가는 길', 넷플릭스에서 만난다, Daum/뉴스1 (2023)](https://v.daum.net/v/20230123134801275)
4. [장선우와 에로비디오—1990년대 한국의 전환기적 포르노 영화, 대중서사연구 (KCI)](https://journal.kci.go.kr/djnar/archive/articlePdf?artiId=ART002167602)
5. [한국영화 100선, 한국영화사의 찬란한 순간과 마주하다!, 한국영상자료원 웹진 (2014)](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/upload/webzine/1f34f3c5-16e7-4043-8e24-07b21f7603af.pdf)
6. [문성근, Seore profile](https://seore.org/raw/%EB%AC%B8%EC%84%B1%EA%B7%BC)
7. [90년대 초 포스트 모더니즘을 담은 영화 경마장 가는 길에서 홍상수를 보다, photohistory (2019)](https://photohistory.tistory.com/19565)
8. [故강수연 1주기 추모전 "영화롭게 오랫동안"…대표작 8편 상영, 아이뉴스24 (2023)](https://v.daum.net/v/20230503211813206?f=p)
9. [https://letterboxd.com/colinmarshall/film/the-road-to-the-racetrack/](https://letterboxd.com/colinmarshall/film/the-road-to-the-racetrack/)
10. [https://jeremycprocessing.com/the-road-to-the-race-track/](https://jeremycprocessing.com/the-road-to-the-race-track/)
11. [https://www.fareastfilm.com/eng/archive/2023/the-road-to-the-racetrack/?IDLYT=15535](https://www.fareastfilm.com/eng/archive/2023/the-road-to-the-racetrack/?IDLYT=15535)
12. [https://extmovie.com/movietalk/93380500](https://extmovie.com/movietalk/93380500)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films early 1990s*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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