“I can’t remember why I came here,” sighs one of the characters, over an hour into Yuya Ishii’s “The Asian Angel.” You may find yourself feeling the same way at various points during this rambling cross-cultural road movie, shot entirely on location in South Korea, but there’s a generous payoff at the end.
Widowed father Tsuyoshi (Sosuke Ikematsu) moves to Seoul with his taciturn young son, Manabu (Ryo Sato), after getting a sketchy business proposition from his older brother, Toru (Joe Odagiri). It turns out that Toru’s associates are even sketchier than he is, and the siblings soon find themselves down and out, though not before crossing paths with Sol (Moon Choi), whose career as a pop singer seems to be going no better than Tsuyoshi’s as a novelist.
After a humiliating tryst with her soon-to-be-former boss, Sol looks like she might be about to end it all, but she’s saved by the appearance of an angel. The experience jolts her back to reality and sends her on a train journey to the coast to visit her parents’ grave, joined by her decent, none-too-bright brother, Jung-woo (Kim Min-jae), and prickly younger sister, Pom (Kim Yae-eun).