Walk Up: An Experienced Cast Takes It to the Next Level

What do you look for in a Hong Sang-soo film? Hypernaturalistic acting? Zigzaggy dialogue that feels wholly improvised? Art about artmaking that gets unapologetically meta? A short list of specific actors whom you recognize as auteurial go-tos? A barely veiled unflattering self-portrait of the prolific director himself? If these are your must-haves then Walk Up is a must-see. This episodic movie sketches the lives of the occupants of a duplex by way of a recipe with those exact ingredients.

As a cougar landlady with a predatory vibe, Lee Hye-yeong turns in an especially riveting performance. She's practically licking her chops as she courts a semi-retired film director (Kwon Hae-hyo) -- with whom she may have had an affair -- to be her new tenant; her disdain for his fretful daughter (Park Mi-so), an interior designer apprentice, is no less visible for being nonverbal. All three of these performers have been in a couple of Hong's previous films and their familiarity with his material shows.

Subtext is what makes Hong's movies work. Actors who realize it's not just a matter of delivering the lines in front of a camera that's unlikely to move and start playing the interior world hard, and piling on motives perhaps not in the script, and being in the scene to the max... these are the type of actors who elevate Hong's material to unexpected heights. Fellow Hong alums like Shin Seok-ho as a boytoy and Song Seon-mi as a floundering restauranteur understand the assignment too. When you're willing to commit fully, you'll creatively creatively thrive on camera in a Hong Sang-soo pic.

Introduction: Hong Sang-soo in Brief

Easily one of Hong Sang-soo's shortest features (running 105 minutes), Introduction nevertheless feels distinct within Hong's oeuvre with its black and white footage, relatively large cast, and slightly more active camerawork. Which isn't to suggest that this doesn't bear his hallmarks. It's just that most scenes despite the single shot POV feature more zooms and pans, and even occassionally splice in other material. Introduction also has a young protagonist: a former actor (Shin Seok-ho) with intimacy issues on camera and relationship issues off.

His girlfriend (Park Mi-so) has problems of her own. She's relocated to Berlin to pursue a degree in fashion, her mother (Seo Young-hwa) is a bit of an underminer, and she's been recently diagnosed with uveitis. Unless that last part is a drunk dream experienced by her beau after too many drinks with his mom (Cho Yun-hee), an old actor (Gi Ju-bong), and a cigarette-bumming best friend (Ha Seong-guk). Neither has an easy road ahead. Maybe his acupuncturist father (Kim Young-ho) can help, although he's been known to forget clients with inserted needles behind the curtain. Better to seek assistance from the new roommate (Kim Young-ho) who -- behind the scenes -- is also serving as still photographer, production manager, and script supervisor.

The Novelist's Film: Auteur Means Author

Considering how ubiquitous face masks were during the pandemic's early years, how strange that more movies don't reflect that reality. Were filmmakers afraid of normalizing masks or hoping they'd disappear or fearful a mask would date their movie. Well, their unaffected presence in Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film makes this one feel both more real and more historic; his choice to shoot in black and white only furthers that time capsule aspect. And so because of the masks, The Novelist's Film doesn't feel dated. It feels honest, artsy and archival, a moving counterpoint to the head-in-the-sand approach employed by nearly every other filmmaker. In other ways, however, this flick is typical Hong Sang-soo: The action is grounded in awkward reunions, this time between a writer (Lee Hye-yeong) and a bookstore-owning friend (Seo Younghwa) then that same writer and a movie director (Kwon Hae-hyo)then the writer and a poet (Gi Ju-bong) who used to be a drinking buddy.

The film gets most engrossing once the writer meets a famous actress (Kim Min-hee) but Hong also keeps us engaged by repeatedly throwing in a third character: a sign-language student (Park Mi-so); a visiting cousin (Ha Seong-guk); a non-speaking little girl (Kim Si-ha) who stares through a window. Everything's made fascinating by the masks, too. Remember when we wore them below our chins to talk? or when we couldn't decide whether to wear them? or when we were the only ones wearing them in our group? or when we wore gloves? As a snapshot of history, Hong gets these details right. Eventually, things gets pretty meta, thanks to the entrance of a famous actress (Kim Min-hee). But from start to finish, The Novelist's Film an effective reminder that feature films can reflect life without ever pretending to be documentaries.

In Our Day: Actors in Search of Something

Hong Sang-soo's In Our Day has two parallel storylines: in one, an aspiring actress (Park Mi-so) comes to visit a successful one (Kim Min-hee) who's staying with the latter's possibly alcoholic friend (Song Seon-mi); in the other, an aspiring actor (Ha Seong-guk) drops by the apartment of a newly sober poet (Gi Ju-bong) who's being filmed by a young documentarian (Kim Sunghyun) for a school project. But as the poet states himself: "Life seems to go on without any connection to those reasons." Like many other Hong films, there's a lot of loosely connected dialogue delivered in profile by two characters facing off so sometimes having a triangle of players lends itself to more dynamic exchanges and tableaux. Even an early scene between two friends benefits when a big fluffy cat named "Us" enters the frame.

In that first scenario, the drama finally escalates when Us suddenly disappears, sending the two main women into a panicked despair. In the second storyline, the poet descends back into bad drinking habits when his admirer runs out to get two bottles of soju. As in his other recent pics, Hong takes on the roles of cinematographer, director, writer, composer, and editor. Is it my imagination or as a result is there less music, less cuts, and less varied angles? The result lands somewhere between Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes, with maybe a little of Woody Allen at his more philosophical thrown in — a static pseudorealism that's neither antidrama nor heightened naturalism. For Hong, one of the most prolific Korean auteurs, "maintaining a clear vision may be the hardest thing in the world." He's right. Just ask the poet.

Nobody's Daughter Haewon: Some Slices of Life Aren't Filling

At one point in Nobody's Daughter Haewon, the title character (Jung Eun-chae) is perusing a copy of Norbert Elias' The Loneliness of the Dying. And death is a topic that strangely informs Hong Sang-soo's rambling slice-of-life drama about a student actress without meaningful direction. Her mother (Kim Ja-ok) is moving to Canada; her ex-lover (Lee Sun-kyun) is married with a new baby; an American professor (Kim Eui-sung) spontaneously takes her out for coffee. Haewon is basically examing what she's going to do before she dies: Will she see her mother again? Will she continue this farce of a relationship with her former professor? Will she marry a random guy she meets in a park?

An unexpected encounter with the one-and-only Jane Birkin argues for living a free life (especially if you're pretty). Will Haewon too inspire a designer purse? Will she end up in a movie directed by Martin Scorsese? Will she compete in a Miss Korea pageant? When you're young, anything seems possible. And in a way, life truly can go in many directions. Much like a Hong Sang-soo film. Reviewimg his canon, I wouldn't say this one ends up in the most interesting or enlightening place -- or that the performances are as thrillingly naturalistic as they can be despite the long shots in profile and the scenes fueled by alcohol -- but Nobody's Daughter... is nobody's total waste of time. And nothing is a secret.

The Woman Who Ran: Post-Marital Research

I haven't seen a Hong Sang-soo film for awhile so it's a bit of a readjustment getting into his rhythm and flow. I know from past experiences, however, that sometimes what looks like a meandering improvisation adds up to something quite substantial. I knew to be patient! Yet what to make of the initial conversations in The Woman Who Ran re: the beauty of a cow's eyes, the bullying by a neighbor's rooster, or the ethics surrounding the feeding of stray cats? Before you've figured that out, Hong has shifted to a completely new scene: gone is the divorcee (Seo Young-hwa) who appears to be in a lesbian couple; in her place is a Pilates instructor (Song Seon-mi) navigating the challenges of dating in middle age. The topics shift from animals to money: a rent deposit, her million-dollar-savings, her successful business... See a connection yet? I didn't.

Which brings us to the final reunion at Cafe Emu where our protagonist (Kim Min-hee) has one more "girl talk," this time with an old friend (Kim Sae-byeok) who now runs a movie theater. This last encounter has the least amount of dialogue but it's also when the movie comes together. For each of these reunions finds our drifting diminishing her feelings from her unseen husband. The random meet-ups suddenly register as a testing of the waters for a possible future, always with an awareness that the men in these other women's lives are uniformly irritating: a demanding neighbor, a stalking poet (Ha Seong-guk), and a self-important author (Kwon Hae-hyo).

The Day After: Seeing Theater

How did Hong Sang-soo manage to make three films in a single year? It certainly wasn't by sloppily running from one to the next. For there's nothing messy or rushed about The Day After, the third of his 2017 trilogy of sorts that also includes Claire's Camera and On the Beach at Night Alone. But it probably helps that he brought in some of the same actors for each film which, because of their intimate nature, concentrates all the action among a very small cast. For The Day After, he also shoots in black and white (which simplifies the design elements) and shoots many of the two-person, largely interior scenes in extended, medium long shots with no cuts and only the occasional zoom, all of which heightens our sense of eavesdropping on a very personal conversation (or perhaps a master class in acting). Indeed Hong's choice to have so much of the action filmed in profile turns the face-to-camera shot into something remarkable since it's only when a character looks away from whomever she's talking to that we see her face directly. And what faces these are to look at.

As Song Areum, a young woman who is starting a fraught new job at a book publishing company, Kim Min-hee constantly delights us with her asides of impatience, distress, confusion. For when she turns away from the other character, she's in some ways shielding her face, meaning that these shots of Kim turning aside are shots of her face unshielded. It's the hidden exposed! As a despairing wife, actress Cho Yun-hee similarly is constantly flashing her hidden self to the camera as she struggles to get her husband to admit that he's been seeing another woman while he noisily slurps his soup. If Kim Sae-byeok shares less, it's because her role as the other woman demands that she generally be on her guard. The only time we truly see her psychologically naked is when she's drunk. Life's tough that way. At the center of it all is Kim "The Boss" Bongwan, the book publisher played by Kwon Hae-yo with an honesty that makes him both impossible to like or dislike. As for the movie as a whole, I liked it very much. I'm so appreciative of the Museum of the Moving Image for programming this trilogy.

On the Beach at Night Alone: The Coast of Dystopia

Hong Sang-soo, the auteur of the consequential inconsequential, whose films sometimes feel like well-stitched patchwork anthologies of irresponsible slights, irresistible self-deceptions, and eloquent awkwardnesses returns with On the Beach at Night Alone, a fragmentary and ultimately somber tale literally split into two distinct chapters — the first set in Hamburg of all places. This prelude of sorts concerns a directionless young actress (Kim Min-hee) who has fled from a disastrous relationship with an unseen, off-screen married South Korea director who has a child but has promised to visit her abroad. Her friend (Seo Young-hwa) in Hamburg, while supportive, doesn't want her to move in -- which is wise given how blunt they are with each other. After the two meet up with a German (Mark Peranson) and his eternally tired wife/girlfriend (Bettina Steinbrügge) for dinner, they take off for an evening stroll on the beach.

The next, longer part of the movie takes place back in South Korea where our lost leading lady now reunites with a trio of former friends in a small town in which she likely shot a film earlier in her career. Because this small group includes Jeong Jae-yeong who like Seo and Kim co-star in Right Now, Wrong Then, On the Beach at Night Alone can feel like a strange sequel. Sure, the names and jobs and identities have changed but doesn't that sometimes happen with the passage of time. I doubt that this is Hong's intent but the recasting of this trio of talented actors does make for especially fascinating viewing.

The second chunk's extended dream sequence (which also ends up on a fairly empty beach) throws all of the action in question into a weird way. But with scenes like the one in which a window washer keeps wiping the smudgy window without water as if he's a renegade performance artist staging an impromptu routine outside an expensive hotel, Hong's pushing beyond hyper-realism into another realm. I don't know what to call it ultimately but I certainly do enjoy spending a couple of hours there given the chance.

Like You Know It All: Just One Second... That May Change

There's something unconcernedly unplanned about Like You Know It All, as if director Hong Sang-soo had daily provided his actors with a single page of rushed dialogue then let them go at it for a few hours. Hong lets his actors loose on the story, lets their impulsive reactions build into something bigger, lets a random idea in the performance or an ad libbed line used to cover a flub as the guiding force for what follows. Or so it seems. Is art-house darling Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) destined to clash with festival programmer Hyeon-hee (Uhm Ji-won) then doomed to reunite with a former lover (Go Hyun-jung)? These encounters hardly seem inevitable. (Who else would throw in a series of arm wrestling matches?) Instead, the realities almost come out of nowhere, as if the unexpected always lied just around the corner. So while the film starts off as a satire about a film festival, full of ass-kissing, back-stabbing, and self-congratulatory artistes -- Like You Know It All ditches that party just at the point when you likely would've grown weary of it yourself. Hong recognizes how boring life is, how repetitious, how squalid, how petty, how hilarious, how misdirected, how laughable. Oh, how wonderful he is!

I laughed a lot during Like You Know It All, perhaps more so than in Hahaha. But Like You Know It All doesn't have that latter film's clever framing device -- a boozy flashback shared by two friends recounting congruent memories. Hong's great at framing devices. Think of the films within films of Oki's Movie or Isabelle Huppert in triplicate for In Another Country. But when you come down to it, I like Hong equally -- if not better -- without the structural cleverness. Meandering, his movies feel fresh and human and vulnerable and ridiculous. Like You Know It All is hardly his most brilliant piece of filmmaking to his credit but it's brilliant all the same.

Footnote: Like You Know It All was shot on HD but is that even newsworthy anymore?

Hahaha: Taking a Page Out of Woody Allen's Book

I don't know why the similarities between Woody Allen and Hong Sang-soo never occurred to me before. They're both directors who crank out a movie a year, and primarily focus on troubled romances -- sometimes seriously, other times comically, oft times of the summer/winter variety, occasionally triangles. They're both critical darlings who have won more than a handful of awards -- both nationally and internationally -- yet neither could be called a box-office goldmine. They also have a small group of actors they reuse in multiple movies then were drawn to casting bigger names later in their careers. For Hong, that last bit has led to Isabelle Hupert in In Another Country and pop star Rain in Soar Into the Sun. Since Hong is a master of naturalistic acting, neither celeb upstages his or her co-stars.

One way that Hong differs from Allen, however, is in his constant use of drunk scenes. In Hahaha, not only is the framework a drunk scene -- two friends recount their overlapping weekend in a small coastal town called Tongyeong -- but so are about a quarter of the events they recount: failed filmmaker Moon-kyeong (Kim Sang-kyung) taking Seong-ok (Moon So-ri) back to a hotel room, depressed critic Joong-sik (Yu Jun-sang) taking his mistress (Ye Ji-won) to meet his uncle, Moon-kyeong's mother (Yoon Yeo-jeong) drinking with all of the above at some point or another. Because it's a Hong Sang-soo film, the drunk scenes are universally good. No one facilitates as many riveting naturalistic performances as Hong.

Both Allen and Hong are experimenters with form, too. Here in Hahaha that manifests itself with the framing conversation that takes place in the present being merely a voiceover to a black-and-white slideshow of Moon-kyeong and Joong-sik toasting, talking and saying "Cheers!" But unlike Allen, Hong isn't one of the leads nor does he cast himself in a cameo. He's got a history of having stand-ins for the alcoholic, womanizing, deluded artist we assume him to be and here he does it in triplicate, the third version being a fickle poet (Kim Kang-woo) who's not only the best friend of pill-popping critic Joong-sik but also a surrogate son to man-child Moon-kyeong's mom who gives the poet a free apartment once Moon-kyeong turns it down.

This is the 10th Hong Sang-soo movie I've seen! (I'm ready for more!)

Oki's Movie: Hong Sang-soo's Echo Chamber

Oh, Hong Sang-soo. Here you go again, you myopic auteur, with your tried-and-true tropes: The philandering filmmaker who drinks too much, the winter-summer romance that doesn't add up, the backstabbing frenemy who for awhile takes the lead, the love triangle that breaks apart then forms anew with somewhat interchangeable people. And also once again, from me, a lot of eye-rolling that culminates with a double-take caused by a narrative twist or a genius piece of dialogue or a stretch of naturalistic acting that really is without peer in Korean cinema, all of which makes me second guess myself and you and what the whole point of movie-watching/making is.

In short Oki's Movie feels both like standard Hong fare and a fresh experiment. A collection of faux student shorts examining the ever-changing relationships of a college film professor (Mun Seong-kun), his protege (Lee Seon-gyun) and the young woman (Jeong Yu-mi) having affairs with them both, Oki's Movie initially feels like typically Hong Sang-soo in the worst way and ends up feeling like typical Hong Sang-soo in the best. The change of heart in the viewer comes late in the game, thanks to two scenes: One, in which the two students -- arriving late to class on a snow day -- are encouraged by the teacher to ask whatever they want which they do with hilarious results; the second, a longer sequence in which a walk in the woods, taken by the young woman first with the professor, then with the student, is compared via short back-to-back footage that, in a very telling way, illustrates what Hong is a master of -- showing the significance of the most seemingly insignificant moments and actions.

As much as I eventually came to appreciate, even like, Oki's Movie, I admit there's still a part of me that wishes that Hong came up with a different plot more often instead of treading familiar ground. But given how prolific he's been of late -- three movies in 2009, two in 2010, two in 2011, one in 2012, and three in 2013 -- I suppose it's inevitable that he repeat himself. To his credit, he does so inventively.

In Another Country: Falling in Love With the Lifeguard All Over Again

Isabelle Huppert in a Korean movie? That's right. It's Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country, a melancholic diversion of three interconnected shorts featuring the transplanted French actress as a bewitching director, a philandering businesswoman and a jilted wife -- each with the same foreign accent. Before you get hung up on Huppert's undifferentiated vocal work, consider this: Hong hasn't cast Huppert to display a Meryl Streep-like range. He's cast her because he recognizes her as a kindred spirit. He knows she's capable of excelling at the in-the-moment acting that exemplifies his films at their best. Indeed, Huppert's proficiency at playing the moments between the moments is most apparent in the opening vignette during which she's largely listening to conversations in Korean she cannot understand in full but nevertheless intuits in good part. If the latter scenes don't allow her to silently upstage her cast mates two more times, they at least show she's in good company with co-stars like Yoon Yeo-jeong, Moon So-ri, and Jeong Yu-mi who match her meaningful glance for meaningful glance as a best friend, a jealous wife and a hotel worker respectively.

The men don't fare as well though. Kwon Hye-hyo may be fine as a hard-drinking man on the make but neither Kim Yong-ok nor Moon Sung-keun are even passably believable as a none-too-clever monk and a mildly amorous director. The nuances of Hong's deceptively simple dialogue escapes them both completely. The only male actor who actually holds his own with the actresses is, ironically enough, beefcake Yoo Joon-sang. Emerging from the waves like a God of Love for each of Huppert's ladies abroad, Yoo's performance as a dimwitted lifeguard isn't mining subtext so much as it's conveying good-natured incomprehension. Flirting in a language he hasn't mastered, he's a consistently humorous counterpart to Huppert's ennui in triplicate. Who wouldn't fall in love with him? And who wouldn't ditch him without remorse soon thereafter?

The Day He Arrives: Drink, Eat and Be Melancholic

Dear Hong Sang-soo,

I'd like to offer you a public apology. After years of bad-mouthing your films and trashing them through reviews on my website and elsewhere, I've come to see the error of my ways. You are indeed a great filmmaker and if I don't like all your movies, the ones I do like, I do so with unrestrained enthusiasm. Count The Day He Arrives in this latter category. Much like the heart-wrenching Woman Is the Future of Man and the despairing The Power of Kangwon Province, your 2011 pic The Day He Arrives is an exquisite picaresque in which a seemingly directionless narrative somehow leads us to a greater appreciation of the inherent tragedy of life.

That you're able to convey such depths of emotions from chance encounters, that you consistently pull such naked performances from your actors, that you can revisit your ironic stand-in, the cad-director (an ingratiating Yu Jun-sang), and make him feel fresh... All these things delight me even as they catch me off-guard since the first few movies of yours I saw repeatedly drove me to fits of rage.

Was Song Seon-mi as good in Woman on the Beach as she is here playing a fawning cineaste? Was Kim Ee-seong as natural in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well as he is here playing an embittered actor? In short, the pleasure I'm getting from your films now makes me doubt my assessments before. Should I retract the savage comments I made on your other flicks? Maybe Night and Day isn't a piece of crap. Maybe your short "Lost in the Mountains" isn't half-baked.

I'll have to go back to those and re-watch them some time. For now, I'll just recommend The Day He Arrives, your flawless, black-and-white meditation on coincidence, love, bromance, loneliness, and the art of creation itself. Well done Director Hong and please, forgive me.

Sincerely,

Drew P.

Woman Is the Future of Man: So Real It Hurts

If asked, I'd say I had a bedgrudging respect for autuer Hong Sang-soo but after re-watching Woman Is the Future of Man, I'm going to let the begrudging part go. Although I may never be able to rally around Night and Day or Woman on the Beach (too many cliches; not enough plot), I actually liked the violently jarring The Day the Pig Fell into the Well and his melancholic The Power of Kangwon Province unreservedly. Woman Is the Future of Man, I downright love. A character portrait of a trio of people, Hong's film makes you cringe and ache so often you may think you've got Tourette's, surfacing as it does the little cruelties we inflict and little pains we experience on a moment-to-moment basis when we're in the thick of it. No one is the hero. No one is the villain. No one is the antihero. Art professor Lee Mun-ho (Yu Ji-tae), budding filmmaker Kim Hyeon-gon (Kim Tae-woo) and the woman they both once loved many years ago, bar manager Park Seon-hwa (Seong Hyeon-a) are three flawed humans trying to get through life, unable to free themselves from the daily treacheries that make survival a small scale war. As such, they're constantly betraying each other and themselves so that eventually the small fortresses that they've built to protect themselves are completely smashed away. Sad? Yes. But electric, too.

You can't really pick out a specific actor as the best one here. Hong has cast astutely right down to the lady across the street from the cafe and the guy in the back of the restaurant where Lee gathers with his students for an ill-fated meal. That said, Yu's professor is a fascinating mixture of bumbling and smooth, Kim's filmmaker can't quite shed the hipster edginess that you pray one day he'll outgrow, and Park conveys a quiet bewilderment as she relives the misguided choices of youth all over again one snowy, sloppy weekend. I'd also like to give a shout out to both composer Jeong Yong-jin for his hauntingly wistful score and to Mary, the black Labrador Retriever, who has so many perfect moments as a background player that you'd award her an Equity card (deluxe edition) if animals got those types of things. In terms of film-watching, 2012 hasn't been a great year for me but Woman Is the Future of Man restores my faith in Korean movies. So thank you, Hong Sang-soo, and sorry about any slights I made to your work in the past. Next time, I'm coming in an unreserved fan.

The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well: The Brutal Beginnings of Auteur Hong Sang-soo

It's easy to think you've got an artist figured out after watching a few films. And after seeing Woman on the Beach, Night and Day, and the short Lost in the Mountains among others, I thought I knew what to expect from a Hong Sang-soo movie and quite frankly, I wasn't that impressed. There'd be some heavy drinking, some philosophical talking and some unsatisfactory sex, as men used clingy women and disappointed women griped. Even in The Power of Kangwon Province, the movie of his I probably like the best, the same elements remained.

But summing up a career based on your acquaintanceship with a handful of works is a big mistake. Imagine judging Woody Allen on Celebrity, Cassandra's Dream, and September or assessing Bernardo Bertolucci strictly on Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers. Big mistake! Which is another way of saying that I may have written off Hong Sang-soo a little too soon.

His feature debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, isn't a great movie but it's a pretty interesting one. And yes, you still have the drinking, the abusing, and the longing but with this particular flick all of that's heightened quite a bit. The arrogant artist -- no stranger to Hong's ouevre -- is a super jerk here. If this is Hong's stand-in, he started his career a lot less sympathetic to his type. A failed writer with a real sense of entitlement and a persecution complex, Hyo-sub (Kim Eui-sung) is a cantankerous diva who picks fights with a girlfriend he doesn't like (Cho Eun-sook), a married woman he claims to love (Lee Eun-kyeong), and all his drinking buddies, including one played by Song Kang-ho in his big screen debut!

This time around, the bickering doesn't culminate in a shouting match. Indeed, what distinguishes The Day a Pig Fell in the Well from other Hong movies is that it's meaner and nastier to start and bloodier and more bewildering at the end. It's also infinitely more enigmatic. The final sequence of the movie flashes back and forward in time, both real and imagined. Whether the brutal realities depicted in those jarring sequences are reflecting internal or external states doesn't matter. Hong's first drama comes at you with both fists flying and you're likely to feel stunned and bruised and even a bit disoriented by the time the credits roll. It's not a knockout but it does pack a wallop.

Visitors: When a Filmmaker Works in Charcoal, This Is What Happens

The three films in Visitors are best described as discarded sketches. By which I mean, they come across as both unfinished and unwanted. The first, Japanese director Naomi Kawase's "Koma" definitely feels as though she's testing out ideas for a bigger film, more than making an actual short movie. Characters are underdeveloped, and the story -- about a young man who comes to pay his respects to his grandfather's former employer only to find himself seduced by a crazy woman who may be misinterpreting him as her spirit bridegroom -- is skeletal and would require more fleshing out to be compelling. Watching "Koma," you definitely pick up on Kawase's background as a documentarian, what with its stories within stories, and its personalization of history, even its use of nature photography as segue. But what is she documenting exactly? An aborted creative process? Dunno.

Next up: Hong Sang-soo's "Lost in the Mountains." It's the most successful of the bunch but it's also the most disappointing because it seems to end halfway. Hong, on familiar ground to be sure, relates the woes of a young writer (Jeong Yu-mi) who keeps plotting her own disappointments: first by popping in on her best friend unexpectedly, then by calling up the married professor (Moon Seong-geun) with whom she had an affair, and then by sleeping with her humpy ex-boyfriend (Lee Seon-gyun) whose career has outstripped her own. A chance encounter involving all four has her tossing aside a coffee cup belligerently and driving away but you feel that the story is really only beginning. This is Act I. Where is Act II? Come to think of it, don't most movies have three acts? I think so!

The final entry is "Butterflies Have No Memories" by Lav Diaz. It's hard to believe that Diaz, like his counterparts here, couldn't find better actors ("stilted" would be kind) or a better cinematographer ("murky" would be generous) or a composer to add some drama where little is found but even if he had, no supporting talent could've rescued this script which is really a second draft. "Butterflies..." might be too short to qualify as a feature film but even so it takes a good third of the movie to even introduce the plot. Quasi-political, the central action concerns some poor guys who decide to don conquistador masks and kidnap their better-off Canadian cousin as a way to make money. This is an instance where you wish Diaz had been invited to a writer's lab at Sundance to refine his tale of the downtrodden losers out to make a quick dime. Was his international application rejected? Who knows?

I think what frustrates me most about Visitors, though, is that both Diaz and Kawase -- Kawase especially -- have chalked up some serious awards yet as an introduction to their work Visitors left me feeling that maybe the awards were misprized. If a short anthology is designed to give a quick taste of a few artists, then Visitors has left me looking for a meal elsewhere. May I see another menu?

The Power of Kangwon Province: Rejection Involves a Loss of Color

Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province is two pretty good movies in one. The first concerns a recent high school graduate (Oh Yun-hong) who joins two friends for a short, frankly miserable vacation at a beachfront tourist trap, where she has a botched romance with a married local cop (Kim Yoosuk). The second half-a-movie focuses on a struggling professor (Baek Jong-hak) with whom the young woman recently had an affair and who happens to be simultaneously taking a much more decadent trip to the same subpar resort. Although the two narratives tie together quite nicely come the final scenes, all of The Power of Kangwon Province feels so infected with melacholia that even tangential asides never feel that disconnected. Mood is everything here. A background story about a man who may have pushed his wife off a cliff only heightens the pervading sense that love is disappointing at best, fatal at worst. As someone who has found Hong's later efforts (Woman on the Beach, Night and Day) to be affected dreck, The Power of Kangwon Province proved unexpectedly moving. This flick has an earnest directness that makes its washed out palette feel like an honest manifestation of the colorlessness of the heart's despair.

Woman on the Beach: Writing What You Know When You Know Nothing

Writer's block is a drag. But when the condition becomes the inspiration for a movie, like it does in Hong Sang-soo's arty Woman on the Beach, audiences tend to suffer right alongside the struggling screenwriter. Admittedly, the case depicted here isn't a particularly crippling or painful one: Hong's stand-in (Kim Seung-woo) is able to work through his creative paralysis in less than a week thanks to some trusty tools familiar to many artists (and moviegoers who frequent biopics of same). How's he do it? Well, he betrays his close-friend/producer (an underutilized Kim Tae-woo) by sleeping with his girlfriend (Go Hyun-jung) then betrays his new girlfriend by seducing a lonely divorcee (Song Seon-mi). Blame it on the soju! As portraits of womanizing artists go, Woman on the Beach is fairly tame stuff because the creative cad at its center neither ruins anyone's life nor exhibits self-destructive behavior on a grand scale. He just makes the lives of those around him a little messy and his own life, a little lonely. We can only hope that the art which he produces by stirring up all that trouble is better than this document of his creative process.

Night and Day: A Cad Abroad (And the Broads Who Love Him)

Somewhere out there is a pamphlet entitled A Beginner's Guide to Existential Filmmaking, Vol. 7: The Paris Edition and somehow director Hong Sang-soo got his hands on a tattered copy. You can tell because his flick Night and Day follows many of the rules therein. To wit: #3 Your protagonist should be a middle-aged man (Kim Yeong-ho) who smokes incessantly. #8 He should fall for a nymphette (Park Eun-hye) whose feet he glimpses poking out from under the sheets. #56 He should also have a wife, a mistress, an ex-girlfriend and a random woman to reject. #114 Scenes should end abruptly, right before something big is going to be said ("What is painting?") or done ("Make love to me!"). Hong's a competent filmmaker so Night and Day is never boring but like a skillful kiss given by a man with bad breath, it's not particularly satisfying either. That disappointing kiss is actually a good analogy too because there's no passion behind Night and Day either. More than anything else, the movie feels like an intellectual exercise in which the director explores ideas like deception, desire, and displacement, minus the deeper anxieties. There's ennui but no poignancy, disillusionment but no real grief.