3 ideas
Lee Myung-jun is a Seoul philosophy student whose father defected to the North. South Korean police beat him over his father's politics, so he crosses to the North, where he grows disillusioned with party dogma and fights for the North in the Korean War. Captured, he is offered repatriation to either side, refuses both, and boards the ship Tagore bound for India, a neutral country, but disappears into the sea before arriving.
A livable society needs two spaces: a 'square', a public sphere where people act together toward shared meaning, and a 'room', a private sphere where people can be alone, love, and think. The South offers private rooms with no real square, because public life there is corrupt, predatory, and empty. The North offers a square with no rooms, because every private feeling must be surrendered to collective slogans.
When the public world offers no square worth entering, intimate love becomes the only remaining place where a person feels real. It is also the most fragile place. Myung-jun's attachments to Yun-ae in the South and to Eun-hye in the North stand in for any political meaning. When Eun-hye dies in the war, even neutrality loses its purpose, which shows that escaping both ideologies does not by itself supply a reason to live.