by ·Comments Off on In Our Day (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

I watched this the same night as In Water just because they’re recent Hong movies with short runtimes, not looking for connections, but I noted characters saying “I’ll do my best / let’s do our best” in both movies. Two separate-but-similar three-person situations with no direct intersection, cutting back and forth between them, each chapter with a preceding descriptive intertitle like it’s a Dickens chapter.

1. Actress Kim Min-hee is staying with friend Song Sun-mi (also Kim’s friend in The Woman Who Ran), when young aspiring actress Park Mi-so comes for a visit/interview.

2. Older Gi Ju-bong (the dad in Hotel by the River) is a belatedly popular poet, Kim Seung-yun is at his place filming candid scenes for a documentary on him, aspiring poet Ha Seong-guk comes to visit/interview (these two costarred in In Water).

Different sorts of dramas ensue – in the first, the host’s cat escapes and the visitor helps recover him. In the second, the visitor is trying to kiss up and stay longer and helps the newly on-the-wagon poet get boozed up.

by ·Comments Off on In Water (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

The one where the shots are out of focus. This is bearable because the movie’s only an hour long, and each scene is differently out of focus, leading one to wonder whether the sharpness of the picture correlates to something in the narrative (he does say his idea is “a little blurry”) or a character state of mind. Three would-be film people are at a beach town on the young director’s dime to shoot his first movie, which he hasn’t written yet. He bristles at how much they’re all spending on food while he postpones the actual shoot, finally steals some ideas from his surroundings and from his past, calling up his ex to ask permission to use a song he wrote her, and playing it into the camera as he walks into the sea, closing the movie and the movie-in-the-movie. So his movie ends up pretty close to our movie, but presumably in focus.

If you could see ’em, the actors are Shin Seok-ho (the lead in Introduction) with Ha Seong-guk and Kim Seung-yun (both also in In Our Day).

by ·Comments Off on Hotel by the River (2018, Hong Sang-soo)

Aging poet Ki Joo-bong (the second section of Grass) arranges to meet his grown sons – Kwon Hae-hyo (film director of In Front of Your Face) and Yu Jun-sang (film director of The Day He Arrives). Only one of them is playing a film director in this movie and I’ve forgotten which. The other is going through a divorce which he’s hiding from dad, who wants to tell his estranged family that he feels he doesn’t have much time left.

two brothers:

Meanwhile upstairs, Kim Min-hee and her friend Song Sun-mi (also her friend in The Woman Who Ran) have been through some stuff and are hiding from the world, resting and getting hungrier. Both groups will finally move to a restaurant down the road where the soju keeps flowing, and the dad’s dark prediction will prove correct soon after.

Michael Sicinski:

Hotel by the River marks a turn in the director’s work, away from his preoccupation with male-female relationships and toward questions of family and lineage. Instead of observing ridiculous men embarrassing themselves in thwarted romantic misadventures, here we are seeing the wreckage that bad men leave in their wake.

by ·Comments Off on In Front of Your Face (2021, Hong Sang-soo)

Two sisters go out for a walk and the stars of the previous movie I watched walk by – it’s another day in the Hongverse.

Lee Hye-young is a former actress back in Korea and staying with her sister Cho Yun-hee (lead guy’s mom in Introduction‘s restaurant scene). She has a meeting with director Kwon Hae-hyo (Yourself and Yours) who wants to film a feature with her, but would settle for a short film, but would settle for sleeping with her. She tells him (before telling her sister) that she’s dying, has a few months, and he leaves her a bittersweet message the next morning (“What I promised yesterday can never happen.”). Elsewhere on the trip, she haunts the house where she used to live, reminiscing and coping (“I believe heaven is hiding in front of our faces”) and visiting the cafe run by her nephew (the star of Introduction).

Antoine Thirion in Cinema Scope:

In a body of work whose narrative scope seems to diminish a little more with each film, In Front of Your Face is still surprisingly laconic: its story unfolds over 24 hours and has barely ten scenes, one of which takes up a good third of the film … While the film’s deceptive structural simplicity seems to adopt its heroine’s fixation on presence and the present, things never cease quietly going off the rails.

by ·Comments Off on Introduction (2021, Hong Sang-soo)

Matter-of-fact lboxd plot description “Youngho goes to see his father who is tending to a famous patient. He surprises his girlfriend, Juwon, in Berlin where she is studying fashion design. He goes to a seaside hotel to meet his mother and brings his friend Jeongsoo with him.”

Maybe the title is because scenes and conversations start and don’t reach expected conclusions. We don’t see Youngho talk with his dad who asked to see him, he doesn’t go back into the restaurant after ditching his mom and the famous actor.

Youngho with his dad’s assistant Ye Ji Won (Turning Gate, Ha Ha Ha):

Youngho is Shin Seok-ho, the neighbor who complains about cats in The Woman Who Ran‘s standout scene. Girlfriend Park Mi-so will return in the 2022 films. The girlfriend’s mother and the actor are both from the second scene in Grass.

by ·Comments Off on The Woman Who Ran (2020, Hong Sang-soo)

Kim Min-hee visits with two friends, and each time an unreasonable man comes to the door, then meets a third friend by accident. First up is Seo Young-hwa (Glasses Woman from Grass). They’re hanging out, conversing and eating with a young neighbor, when a new neighbor rings the bell to ask them to stop feeding stray cats, which they politely refuse – this is my vote for favorite scene, which even ends with one of Hong’s trademark Random Zooms on a cat. We also get chickens and crows, more animals than usual.

Friend 1 and a collision of neighbors:

The next friend is Song Seon-mi (Kim’s assistant in On The Beach), who slept with a local poet and now he’s obsessed, knocking on her door every day. This is not as enjoyable a meal (Song burns the dinner) or confrontation as the first one. Friend 3 is Kim Sae-byuk, also of Grass, married to an author who Kim used to date. Kim runs into Kwon Hae-hyo, the guy with cool hair in Yourself and Yours, and it’s awkward – she closes with “You really should just stop talking.” Daniel Kasman in Mubi figured out what it all means.

Comfy with Friend 2:

Less Comfy with Friend 3:

by ·Comments Off on Tale of Cinema (2005, Hong Sang-soo)

He is Sangwon, she is Youngshil, meeting by chance after years. They are young and stupid, and bad at sex – even more pathetic than the characters in Woman is the Future of Man – get drunk and hook up and decide to die together. But she awakens and calls for help, and rescued Sangwon fights bitterly with his family.

Sangwon (right) with his brother:

Dongsoo is attending a retrospective of a sick/dying filmmaker, a former classmate. He stalks an actress, Youngshil – they get drunk and hook up and consider dying together. “I’m too fond of drinking. Life is too tough.” Aha, I’d been wondering why the first 45 minutes of Tale of Cinema contained no cinema, but it was meant to be the dying filmmaker’s short film – Dongsoo claims his own life story was stolen for the script (very believable – both guys are flaky and awkward and smitten with Youngsil). Good ending. Michael Sicinski:

When Dongsoo admits to Youngshil that he believes that their old director friend “stole” his life to make the movie they just saw, he is admitting that he lives in his own head, in his own internal tale of cinema. This is why, at the end of the film, Youngshil’s final line to him – “You didn’t really understand that movie” – is so withering. Dongsoo quite literally does not understand the ‘movie’ of which he is the star, that is, his own life.

Dongsoo & Youngshil:

Incredibly, I don’t know any of the three leads from the other twelve Hong movies I’ve seen. She’s from Like You Know It All, the first guy was in Woman on the Beach, and second male lead is from Memories of Murder.

by ·Comments Off on Woman is the Future of Man (2004, Hong Sang-soo)

Two old friends get together, the larger Munho (Yoo Ji-Tae of Oldboy the year before) is a married teacher, and the glasses-wearing Hyeongon (Kim Tae-Woo of Joint Security Area) a wannabe filmmaker. Seonhwa (Hyun-Ah Sung of a couple Kim Ki-duk films) is introduced being abducted by a former schoolmate.

drunken hanging-out:

Things begin repeating and skipping through time, both guys with Seonhwa at different points, then they’re reminiscing and visit her again… she is basically mistreated, and they’re both kinda pathetic. Multiple sex scenes, a fun soundtrack. I’m being short and inspecific since I watched this too long ago.

by ·Comments Off on Grass (2018, Hong Sang-soo)

“How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been drinking.”

Opens with long-take conversation about a dead friend, the camera zooming in then panning back and forth. He (Ahn Jae-hong, his fourth Hong film) walks out to smoke while she (Gong Min-jeung, her third) is still yelling at him. Then we see Kim in a corner typing on her laptop, not looking up, commenting on the couple’s conversation in voiceover. Separate shot, so she’s possibly not there at same time – could be writing about this, or inventing it and we’re seeing the fiction she’s creating. Later it’s established that she hangs out at this restaurant and overhears conversations – in any event, it’s a heavy opening scene.

Conversation 2 is Ki Joo-bong and Seo Young-hwa, both Hong veterans, and there’s more death talk. He is depressed, attempted suicide over a love affair. She has a new place, and he is persistently asking if he can move in, but she refuses, the string music getting fuller and louder. I think both men have been actors so far.

Next couple is outdoors, oooh, and he’s another actor, though he wants to write screenplays. He is Jung Jin-young, the film director in Claire’s Camera, and she is Kim Sae-byuk of the Hong movie that premieres next week. Anyway, she says no, so the actor corners Kim instead and asks if she wants to cowrite screenplays – there are some persistent dudes in this movie.

The fourth couple is there to see Kim – it’s her brother (Shin Seok-ho of Hotel by the River) and his fiancee (Ahn Sun-yeong of On The Beach At Night Alone). Kim is dismissive of their relationship, and shitty to her brother: “They call themselves men, but in dealing with pain, or when ending things, they act like cowards.”

Another conversation in the same restaurant during dinner – and it’s more people blaming each other for a suicide. Each convo has been a single take, and this one is unusual for not showing the man’s face. She is Lee Yoo-young, the lead of Yourself and Yours with the slippery identity, and he is newcomer Kim Myeong-su, who makes her cry as “Oh Susanna” comes on the radio.

Four from earlier end up drinking together, Kim still listening in (“Do you know I hear everything you say? I have good hearing, you know?”), and they repeatedly invite her to join them, which she finally does. “By the end of the film, Areum is forced to reckon with the very people she so casually, even callously inserted into her writing” – AV Club made more sense out of it than I did, comparing the story to In The City Of Sylvia.