English Title: Nobody’s Daughter Haewon
Korean Title: 누구의 딸도 아닌 해원/Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon
Premiere Date: February 15, 2013
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: Berlin
Film Number: 14
First Viewing Number: 12
First Viewing Date:
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 11
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 16
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 13
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 11
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 90 minutes (14th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Three unequal parts, moderate repetition
Recurring Actors: Yoo Joon-sang (sixth appearance), Lee Sun-kyun (fourth appearance), Gi Ju-bong (fourth appearance), Kim Eui-sung (third appearance), Ye Ji-won (third appearance), Ahn Jae-hong (second appearance), Bae Yu-ram (second appearance), Shin Sun (second appearance), Jung Eun-chae (first appearance), Han Jai (first appearance)
Season: Spring (March 21-April 3)
Weather: Rainy, cloudy, foggy
Alcohol: Soju, makgeolli, Cass beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee (iced), tea (Chinese), water
Food: Meat/kimchi grill, instant ramen, bananas, rice, banchan
Drinking Scenes: 2
Creative People: Film actors, directors
Academia: Film professors and students
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: 3
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Daughter-mother
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 3
Number of Shots: 58
Number of Zooms: 13 out, 27 in
Music Style: Bright piano and synth strings, piano Symphony No. 7 (Beethoven), synth Symphony No. 7
Title Background: Light blue with black thin lines/Orange with blue text for closing credits
Voiceover: Yes

At first glance, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon seems like an outlier in the neat Jung Yu-mi cycle that will come to a head in the next film, without the clear continuity that Hahaha and The Day He Arrives had in putting Yoo Joon-sang in the lead. For one, it is the first time since Night and Day that Hong has put an actor new to his universe as the lead, not to mention the title character, something previously only afforded to Oki and Soo-jung (the virgin stripped bare by her bachelors). For another, it could be seen as a Jung film that simply doesn’t have her acting in it: the love interest is Lee Sun-kyun as a film professor once again, there’s a mention of a Professor Song, and there’s a greater emphasis on unreliable or ambiguous events, here via an extended dream sequence in the manner of “List.” But Jung Eun-chae, who only appears in one more Hong, has a distinct presence all her own, and in its own way this film plays with unsettling undercurrents in a manner more akin to The Day He Arrives while also accessing a piercing emotionality; something of an strange but enormously successful hybrid for Hong.

The complexities begin with the title of Nobody’s Daughter Haewon; between this overt statement of rootlessness and the first fifteen minutes of the film where Haewon spends time with her mother and dreams of, of all people, Jane Birkin as her mother figure, an immediate contradiction is established that the rest of the film only begins to fully unravel. For even though Haewon is certainly the main character, the film is at its core dedicated to trying to determine who exactly she is as a character, something constructed during each interaction she has with another character.

This is in large part owed to Jung’s performance. Unlike, say, Jung Yu-mi’s expressiveness or Yoo’s hangdog expressions, Jung has something more cagey, an innate sadness influenced by her mother’s departure to Canada — like Moon-kyung in Hahaha — and the weight of her affair with Seong-joon; the guilt about infidelity is far more emphasized than normal, especially considering his baby, and the secrecy about their relationship is almost absurd. There’s also, as Birkin notes, something of a Charlotte Gainsbourg quality to Jung; she lived for nine years in England, is notably taller than other Hong women — which may or may not reflect mixed-race heritage, an unexpected detail thrown out during the only true Hongian scene of drunken conversation — and her face is more defined, a quiet determination in her eyes that makes her more overtly unpredictable than almost any Hong protagonist thus far.

That unpredictability defines Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, not only in its dream sequences and upending of the last third of the film; aside from Haewon in the library, the last “real” image is of Seong-joon crying alone in Fort Namhan, and the final shot and line are some of Hong’s most mysterious moments. For one, there are the two decisive shifts in perspective, where characters talk about Haewon while she isn’t within earshot; Hong almost always has one of his main characters in the conversation in every scene (Seong-joon doesn’t quite qualify), so these exclusions feel incredibly pointed. While one is openly hostile, film students deriding her dating habits and supposedly aristocratic manner, and one is more of concern, both set her apart as different, calling the viewer to see her as a new kind of Hong protagonist, one that should be examined even as she introduces each party by writing in her diary (a possible callback to The Day He Arrives).

Even though there’s the putative structure of days that’s reminiscent of Night and Day and the conscious repetitions, especially the recurring use of “The Spot” cafe/bookstore and the cigarette, this is probably the first Hong that I found genuinely hard to pin down structurally. It can be roughly subdivided into interactions with certain people, although Seong-joon floats in and out without warning, and is initially set off-balance by the dedication to Haewon’s interactions with her mother Jin-joo (Kim Ja-ok, who died of cancer a year after this film). The caginess is there already: her hesitancy about the prospects her mother mentions, the willingness in her dream that she has to sell her soul to be like Gainsbourg, the idea that living is dying and that seizing the day is necessary when a person comes closer to death with each moment. But the final scene they have together, where Jin-joo recognizes her daughter’s growth and the plan for them to just have happy days from then on, is really quite moving, in the same manner as in Hahaha, only for Haewon to fall into her old habits again.

Among other things, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is maybe the most unexpectedly metatextual Hong yet, where characters and motifs from other films float in without warning. Joong-won, a professor from San Diego who apparently is rewriting a script for Martin Scorsese, is played by Kim Eui-sung, who enacts the exact same “two extremes” approach of reading a woman as he does in The Day He Arrives. When he injures himself while drinking, Seong-joon has almost the exact same facial wound as Kyeong-nam in Like You Know It All; Kangwon Province is mentioned again. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, used as the credits music for Night and Day, becomes the theme of this film, with Seong-joon listening to a synth version of it as his mood music. Most destabilizingly of all, Joong-sik and Yeon-joo reappear as themselves (and played again by Yoo and Ye Ji-won, the latter with a much shorter haircut) from Hahaha, with Joong-sik still taking his depression pills and wearing his glasses (which he doesn’t do in other Hongs); apparently, he’s still married despite swearing to live with her, and their affair has now been going on for 7 years at this point. Since this is part of the dream, which lasts even longer than the previous longest one in “List,” it’s unclear whether these are simply projections of her mind (which may have even seen these Hong films in-universe) or incorporating her actual friendships with these characters, but the possibilities intermix, as if suggesting that the only way to understand Haewon — and Hong at large — is through other films, which is of course a great part of the Hongian approach.

Other parts, while not as explicitly related to Hong’s other films, have a surreality all their own: the repeated use of the lit cigarette on the ground even after Dong-joo, the awkward bearded bookseller, departs from the film; the reappearance of a few film students from The Day He Arrives; the amazing details of the drinking students — I’ve always been incredibly fond of the woman who’s slumped in the back, about to fall asleep at any moment. There’s also Gi Ju-bong as something of a counselor figure for both Seong-joon and Haewon, and Joong-won’s apparent mind control that allows him to summon gray taxis and the very nature of his character, which straddles the line between charming and creepy in his sudden conviction that they must marry, coupled with Haewon’s genuine consideration of it.

Still, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon both is and isn’t a film about Haewon dealing with her relationships, where true closure remains in the realm of fantasy for her; her mother is still alive but far away, she can’t quite communicate with Seong-joon in the way she wants; she still lacks motivation to go to class and engage with fellow students who despise her. Instead, she’s left with the English copy of Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying, which reminds me of both her observation that death resolves all and of her statement that she’s the devil. More than any other Hong protagonist so far, Haewon is at her core a person afraid to show who she is, whether through “real” conversation or little things like writing in a book or paying an unspecified amount for it. All she can do is sadly dream of such things, and they’re such unsettling, mysterious, wonderful dreams to watch.

English Title: In Another Country
Korean Title: 다른 나라에서/Dareun Naraeseo
Premiere Date: May 21, 2012
U.S. Release Year: 2012
Festival: Cannes
Film Number: 13
First Viewing Number: 2
First Viewing Date: October 10, 2016
Viewing Number: 3
Ranking (at beginning of run): 17
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 15
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 2
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 18
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 89 minutes (16th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Three parts, heavy repetition
Recurring Actors: Jung Yu-mi (fifth appearance), Yoo Joon-sang (fifth appearance), Youn Yuh-jung (third appearance), Moon Sung-keun (fourth appearance), Moon So-ri (third appearance), Isabelle Huppert (first appearance), Kwon Hae-hyo (first appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Rainy, sunny
Alcohol: Soju, Max beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Ginseng tea, water
Food: Barbecue, corn chips, halibut sashimi, tuna sandwich, banchan, instant ramen, grapes
Drinking Scenes: 5
Creative People: Directors, screenwriter
Academia: Folklore professor
Vacation: 3
Dream Sequences: 2
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: 3
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 3
Family: N/A
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: N/A
Number of Shots: 70
Number of Zooms: 18 out, 32 in
Music Style: Gentle piano and harp, calm piano and synth horn
Title Background: White paper and blue pen/Purple background for closing credits
Voiceover: 3

Among his countless strengths, Hong is one of the greatest directors of all time in crafting “major minor” films, where the films that might be perceived as even more sketch-like or tossed off than his others nevertheless contain some of his most piercing insights. His Huppert films, especially In Another Country, have this particular quality for me, and that’s partly why it’s taken me a while and numerous viewings — this was the second Hong I watched, on my 19th birthday — to key in on what makes them so special in his work, above and beyond her presence and their own particular differences.

Huppert and Hong met at a retrospective for him in 2011 at the Cinémathèque Française, and he proposed her acting in one of his films over makgeolli during a photo exhibition for her in Seoul. Indeed, I’m almost certain that her casting played a substantial role in sustaining Hong’s international profile for a few more years: after being mired in Un Certain Regard for the past few films, he made it back to the Cannes Competition, albeit still not winning anything. And, while this wasn’t selected for NYFF in Richard Peña’s last year, it did form the third part of the annus mirabillis of the 2012 release year, where three Hongs all played for a week in New York thanks to Cinema Guild, including, for the first time, a film that premiered in the same year. I had assumed this was thanks to In Another Country specifically, but Oki’s Movie and The Day He Arrives actually were released before Cannes on the week of April 20th, but it’s still notable all the same.

But before getting to Huppert, I want to talk about how In Another Country adds yet another shining dot to the Jung Yu-mi constellation. As it turns out, the first three shots appear to be literally reused from the first three shots of “List”; almost the inverse of the relationship between Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons and “Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene.'” There’s the shot of the West Blue Hotel sign, the conversation between her and Youn before the latter eats some cake — it’s cut off right before the pan left as Jung leans back — and Jung beginning to write on her notepad. But I had also totally forgotten about how Jung incorporates both herself and her mother into the script — for some reason I had remembered it being three aborted attempts at writing a script, instead of a purposeful structuring of three separate stories about a charming French woman named Anne (a Haneke reference?).

In all three, Jung is the helpful hotel manager Won-joo, perhaps after moving to Mohang like she suggested in the conversation with her mother — though she says she’s taking time off, and her given age of twenty-five seems less than the conversations in “List” suggested. She makes tuna sandwiches, introduces people to their rooms, and goes out with Anne each time, though they always seem to either part ways or lose each other. Each time she is told she is complemented by Anne, and each time she self-effacingly demurs with a charming politeness; her mother is also cast in the third part as the most totally friendly person to Anne, also getting an opportunity to smoke on the balcony she was on at the beginning. In Another Country itself, even before getting into the “main” narratives, thus becomes a more explicitly playful film for Hong than normal, where the writer — conceiving of these stories to calm her nerves in a possibly tense situation, as opposed to the determination to make the best of her circumstances in “List” — is allowed to participate in the action, a pleasant recurring face that can also take responsibility; it reminds me much more than I expected of Kim Min-hee in Grass.

Still, while Jung’s presence and the importance of “List” are crucial, In Another Country is really dedicated to Huppert in a way Claire’s Camera isn’t. Aside from, as some have noticed, an opportunity for Huppert to utilize her underappreciated comic acting and to shed the adamantium imperiousness that typically forms her screen presence, across the three parts she gets to show very different sides of herself, despite the surface-level similarities of her charmingness and Frenchness.

The first part focuses on her as an outsider the most, largely because of the sharp interplay between the heavily pregnant Geum-hee (Moon So-ri from Hahaha) and Jong-soo — Kwon Hae-hyo, one of my favorite Hong recurring actors in his first role, already playing the untrustworthy man. Huppert is frequently an observer in these scenes, watching as Korean is being spoken in front of her and interjecting with salient readings of tones of voice and reactions. Even in her scenes with Yoo Jun-sang’s lifeguard — hilariously probably the most Hong has fixated a male, or even female body — she often watches as he sings remarkably well, though he’s as much of an ultimate observer across all three story lines as any of Yoo’s other roles, especially in the second part. The only time she truly expresses herself audibly is when she talks about her (relatable) laziness and unwillingness to take on responsibility, to Jong-soo and Geum-hee’s disagreement. In some ways, that’s what makes this incarnation distinct from the others: as an international director inspired by one that Jung’s character at the Jeonju Film Festival — it’s also worth noting that Anne and Jong-soo kissed in a Berlin playground, another invocation of Germany — she also has a certain remove, not wanting to get too involved with anyone and simply visiting for the pleasure of it.

The second part presents perhaps the most unalloyed portrait of Anne alone — wandering around in the town that, in both this part and the third, she claims has nothing, a far cry from Mi-hye’s attitude in “List” — while she waits for Moon-soo; this is the only part where Moon Sung-keun appears, and the first two dreams and third actual appearance form a mini-trio within the triad structure at large. The central dream, in particular, is probably Hong’s longest yet — aside from “List” of course — and, on my first viewing, honestly threw me; I hadn’t experienced anywhere close to the acidity of early Hong, and so I thought the heated discussion in the sashimi restaurant was uncharacteristic. But it also gets across, as much as the halting English that all characters speak (Huppert less so of course), a certain cultural difference: the sarcasm that Anne deploys throughout that’s typically not within Hong’s scripts: people say what they mean, whether it turns out well or not. Anne is in many ways a cagier character than the typical Hong protagonist: when she slaps Moon-soo when they appear to finally meet in the end, it could be to persuade herself she isn’t dreaming again, that she’s still mad at him for being late, or any other reason; the difference from normal is that she says that she’s doing it because she loves him, a more Western expression of love that would be anathema to most Koreans.

The last part is more overtly reflective, not just because it’s about a woman picking up the pieces from her divorce — the inference, of course, is that this is an iteration of Anne where her motor company VP had an affair instead of or alongside her own with Moon-soo, though the wealth she has isn’t explicitly laid out this way — or because it features religion to perhaps the greatest degree in Hong yet. Anne writes in French on a ceiling tile, reminiscent of Ji-sook in The Power of Kangwon Province, and adds what looks like a cross on it; later she will first question and then be bewildered by the monk played by Kim Yong-ok, the only actor in this who isn’t a recurring Hong figure, though his timing and expressions are excellent. Like the impromptu Q&A in Oki’s Movie, these very direct questions — why do I lie? why am I so miserable? what do you mean? what is love for you? — are met by hilariously cryptic koans that nevertheless resound with intuitive meaning. After this, and her request for the Mont Blanc fountain pen that acts as a more concrete thing in this part that feels more abstract and limited by her own understanding than the rest — sadly we don’t get to see the monk’s drawing of her — she is liberated, free to drink soju from the bottle, sleep with the lifeguard, and set out on the “unknown path,” while it appears that Jong-soo and Geum-hee are back again to actually make the film about the “suffering” people of Mohang (we never see any inhabitants, everyone is an outsider of sorts), with the latter possibly pregnant again. Despite the overtones of suicide, it remains much more ambiguous, and indeed almost feels more like a near-omnipotence over what happens in the narrative: Won-joo immediately intuits the significance of the lighthouse — only seen when Mi-hye and her mother find it in “List” and when Anne stumbles upon it without looking for it in the second part; later she can’t find it again — Anne gives up her fruitless quest for the lighthouse, and of course she retrieves the umbrella that was stashed in the previous part.

Little moments of greater meta-awareness on Anne’s part are present in other parts as well: she dreams of the tent in the second part and then finds it; she knows to ask to pay for the international phone calls that Sook had bemoaned moments before; she realizes that Jong-soo will try to seduce her on the dry bed, which for once doesn’t carry over to the third part.

When I first saw this, I recall saying that In Another Country was the type of film I’m almost predisposed to love, foregrounding its repetition in ways that were obvious to me even then. That’s still true, but more and more I’ve come to adore the mysterious manner in which Hong evokes it and finds it within the obvious techniques: the significance of the shot from the balcony of Geum-hee in the second part, who doesn’t otherwise appear and which calls back to her last shot in the first part; Anne saying “c’est beau” twice in the second part; the fork in the road, which is taken to the right in the first and third parts and left in the second; the lifeguard saying he’s not cold in the first two parts (in different contexts) but cold in the third. The foreignness of Anne, and her ability to transcend and escape the narrative structure in a way that Yoo and Jung can’t quite in their films, are definitely differentiating factors, as is a greater focus on aging (especially for Sook), but the plays with repetition are all Hong’s own.

English Title: List
Korean Title: 리스트/Liseuteu
Premiere Date: October 7, 2011
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: N/A
Film Number: N/A
First Viewing Number: N/A
First Viewing Date: September 7, 2018
Viewing Number: 3
Ranking (at beginning of run): N/A
Ranking (at end of run): N/A
Film Number (including shorts): 14
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 17
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 15
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 29 minutes (28th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear dream with linear bookends
Recurring Actors: Jung Yu-mi (fourth appearance), Yoo Joon-sang (fourth appearance), Youn Yuh-jung (second appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny
Alcohol: Max beer, soju
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Water, tea
Food: Korean barbecue, fish, chocolate cake, popsicle
Drinking Scenes: 2
Creative People: Film director
Academia: N/A
Vacation: 3
Dream Sequences: 1
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 1
Family: Daughter-mother
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: N/A
Number of Shots: 21
Number of Zooms: 5 out, 8 in
Music Style: Light piano
Title Background: Green background
Voiceover: Yes

Every Hong film has its own strange story of creation and how it found its audience (or didn’t). “List,” the only Hong short that hasn’t been explicitly tied to one of his films or to an omnibus project, presents an especially fascinating case: it apparently showed once in Seoul theaters in 2011, before disappearing and resurfacing twice at the then-complete Hong retrospective in 2016 at the Museum of the Moving Image, where it showed with The Day He Arrives, its compatriot from the same year. Then it dropped out of sight again, before it streamed for free through Le Cinéma Club in 2018, and is now readily available on Cinema Guild’s Grass Blu-ray. I recount all this because it makes me think about how the availability of Hong, especially in HD quality, has slowly but steadily grown over the years. To my eyes, the only Hongs not available in proper HD files are “Lost in the Mountains” and Hahaha, but when I first ran through his films, I watched films like On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate on mediocre DVDs; at least a little bit of my renewed appreciation comes from my greater appreciation of the pictorial quality of early and middle Hongs alike.

Though “List” was released the same year as The Day He Arrives, it has, if I’m remembering correctly, the same framing device as Hong’s follow-up In Another Country: Jung Yu-mi and Youn Yuh-jung are daughter and mother on vacation, the former writes something on a notepad, and the film acts as a visualization of what’s written down. I don’t think In Another Country involves an uncle who’s a criminal as the impetus for this trip, but it introduces a bit of an edge that the rest of the film largely lacks on purpose.

Indeed, the straightforwardness of most of “List” is almost disarming, a stripping-down of Hong’s narratives as evident as in “Lost in the Mountains,” where the only true obstacles within the dream lie in Mi-hye’s initial reticence towards the director of Spring on Mt. Hanra and, in a truly late-breaking complication, the emotional pain that her mother has inflicted. One is tempted, in some sense, to impose something of a Hongian structure, and of course the list itself — Hong caters so closely to cinephiles like myself that of course he’d make one for the list obsessives — provides something like that; the cross-fade of it over the shot from the balcony of the hotel is a technique that I don’t think Hong’s ever used before or since.

But the question of whether this is merely a dream or in fact a vision of the day’s events is an open one. When Mi-hye recited her list in the closing scene, I found myself thinking that looking at the stars through her telescope was the one item that didn’t happen in the dream, seconds before she remarked that it wasn’t needed. It could be read multiple ways: that this idealized version of what she planned persuaded her to cross it off, that the dream that she might have forgotten details of nevertheless subconsciously influenced her, or that by crossing it off, her dream could come into being.

It’s also perfectly unclear if the dream accurately reflects Mi-hye and her mother’s characteristics: the latter’s mischievousness and the former’s reluctance to marry (along with the aforementioned trauma) may very well be exaggerated. The director is also easily the kindest Hongian man yet; it’s hilarious to see a main character who’s actually financially successful, able to afford treating people to fish, and who’s so open with his divorce and the possibility of losing focus thanks to drinking and meeting actresses; I also realized that Jung Yu-mi is the first Hong protagonist I can remember who doesn’t smoke, she mentions that Mi-hye at least has weak lungs.

Aside from the list structure, I also found myself gravitating to a few turning points in Mi-hye’s feelings towards the director, all related to light. She first seems to truly warm to him when he takes her picture, eventually laughing along with his boisterous response; then there is the shot of the moon partially obscured by clouds — which is cut to from a shot of the director exhaling smoke, an uncommon graphic match cut for Hong — that leads her to take the initiative in inviting him to stay in the apartment. These little twists of growing attraction and the genuineness of the feeling that they have is left open, unlike, say, Seong-jun in The Day He Arrives, who closes off things and wants them to remain memories.

“List” might be almost too straightforward for its own good, but it is just so full of pleasant moments, the likes of which Hong doesn’t typically afford himself all stringed together uninterrupted: the badminton scene, presented much more stably and at greater length than the football in Woman Is the Future of Man and Like You Know It All; the pan past the lighthouse to the barges; Mi-hye’s new tooth-brushing method; it’s also fun seeing the two most prominent Hong actors of his middle era, Jung and Yoon, interacting at such length, with Youn as a great side character. The final scene itself, with the mother initially reading and then Jung filling in the details, and the look of appreciation that she gives her at the massage item, is unabashedly lovely.

English Title: The Day He Arrives
Korean Title: 북촌 방향/Bugchon Banghyang/In the Direction of Bukchon
Premiere Date: May 19, 2011
U.S. Release Year: 2012
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Film Number: 12
First Viewing Number: 1
First Viewing Date: October 9, 2016
Viewing Number: 4
Ranking (at beginning of run): 2
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 13
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 1
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 2
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 79 minutes (22nd longest)
Color/Black & White: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Five unequal parts, heavy repetition
Recurring Actors: Yoo Joon-sang (third appearance), Go Hyun-jung (third appearance), Gi Ju-bong (third appearance), Song Seon-mi (second appearance), Kim Eui-sung (second appearance), Baek Jong-hak (second appearance), Park Su-min (first appearance), Kim Sang-jung (first appearance), Ahn Jae-hong (first appearance), Bae Yu-ram (first appearance), Baek Hyeon-jin (first appearance)
Season: Winter (end of year)
Weather: Cloudy, snowy
Alcohol: Max beer, Johnnie Walker Black Label, soju, makgeolli
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, water, Perrier
Food: Grilled fish, beef, instant noodles, dumplings, peanuts, fruit, cookies, cherry tomatoes, rice
Drinking Scenes: 6
Creative People: Film directors, actors, critics
Academia: Film professors and students
Vacation: 1-5
Dream Sequences: 0-5
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 1
Family: N/A
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 2
Number of Shots: 64
Number of Zooms: 22 out, 38 in
Music Style: Enchanting synth piano and strings and horns
Title Background: Red background/Blue background for closing credits
Voiceover: Yes

It’s only fitting that what qualifies most for a consensus favorite Hong — at least among his admirers — is among the strangest and most unclassifiable in his oeuvre. The Day He Arrives has always held an enormous sway over my perception of Hong — it was the first one I ever saw, the day before I turned 19 — and, unless something drastically changes during this project, is my second favorite Hong, an opinion I incidentally share with Sean, Evan, and Dan among presumably many others. But I feel like my perception of it changes every time, and even though this is the first Hong feature so far that I’ve watched multiple times (four now, albeit not in four years), my memory also seems to leave out a good number of things. This is probably appropriate as well: the structure of the film is among Hong’s most slippery, easily interpretable in an infinite number of ways, though the mysteries of the film only begin there.

The Day He Arrives is a truly great and foreboding English title, but in some ways, the Korean title, which roughly translates to In the Direction of Bukchon, is maybe an even more fitting starting point. Referring to the village within Seoul where the film takes place while suggesting that it never truly arrives, the title immediately foregrounds the place, which has been preserved to look like how an urban village would have looked 600 years ago. While this is only really apparent to me as a foreigner in the greater use of brick than in most of Seoul, it implicitly casts a feeling of incongruity — the batting cage that is briefly seen in direct contrast to the temple on the mountain shown in the far distance — where these modern people with modern concerns (an iPhone is seen for the first time in Hong’s films) are almost trapped in the past.

That feeling of entrapment was my read of The Day He Arrives, and indeed the final close-up on Seong-jun as his picture is taken — the photographer is Go Hyun-jung, the Woman on the Beach in her last Hong appearance, and the scene generally feels like an elaboration of the Seo Young-hwa scene in Oki’s Movie — is probably the most haunting image that Hong has captured. This is especially accentuated by Hong’s long-anticipated return to black-and-white, his first on digital and only second after Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors eleven years before. The effect, helped by it being the second winter film in a row after three summer films, is one of isolation, where the space between people seems magnified by monochrome unless they make physical contact. Many moments of dislocation happen throughout, but my idea of how this entrapment is achieved has shifted, along with a greater dimensionality of structure that gradually but inexorably unfurls.

It’s very easy to get bogged down in the structure of The Day He Arrives, and for good reason, something greatly encouraged by the English title — I should note here that Kevin B. Lee’s video essay on this was a great early influence on my Hong thinking, and it’s never far from my mind when I watch it, especially his observations about disappearing snow and identical outfits. Whether this is the events of one day, five days, any amount in between, or even an imagined set of encounters that never actually happen is something that could be endlessly discussed, but it threatens to obscure how adroitly drawn and mystically reflected the character interactions become across the day(s), which I’ll get to in a bit.

Likely because it was my first Hong, I had a perhaps outsized association of him with Yoo Jun-sang; because he appeared in the first three Hongs I saw and led this one I assumed that he was one of Hong’s most consistent stars. In fact, this is the only Hong that Yoo leads solo, but while the film clearly takes place from his perspective, with reflective voiceover to match — the line where he resolves to return home “in a flash” weirdly reminds me of Belmondo in the car in Breathless — he fulfills a similar role to his other co-lead performance in Hahaha. After the first two days, which help introduce us to Seong-jun, his hiatus from directing, and his interactions with Kyung-jin — played by Kim Bo-kyung in, incredibly, her only Hong role despite her prominence here — the third and fourth days, which, depending on one’s definition, take up about 45 minutes of this 79 minute film, shift the focus at least somewhat to his friends and acquaintances, and he often becomes more akin to an observer of other characters’ elucidation.

This is perhaps Hong’s most purely ensemble film, both in terms of the quality of acting of each of the five main actors — I hadn’t recall the Jeonwonsa logo changing but the version here has five, I’ll have to keep track — and in how they’re utilized to create almost a shared mind that, of course, could simply be Seong-jun’s projection. But that doesn’t make it any less stunning when Joong-won — Kim Eui-sung, Hong’s very first lead in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, who did indeed take an extended hiatus from acting, though I doubt there was bad blood between him and Hong; he becomes a regular after this — after mostly remaining reticent in the second Novel bar scene, suddenly takes center stage and talks about the two extremes that, when put together, seem to sum up a whole person, even though both he and Seong-jun outside say that they are bad at reading people. The second Dajeong restaurant scene then recapitulates this idea even though Joong-won — last seen piled into a taxi — only appears during the third day. Even the first mention of queerness in Hong’s films, a light-hearted joke between Seong-jun and Young-ho, works so well because of the interplay of the two of them and Bo-ram; it’s also accompanied by an *extreme* zoom into close-up that Hong uses for the first time in a few scenes here.

The repetitions abound of course. The “bar called Novel” phrasing happens thrice, along with Young-ho’s amazing flourish of turning around, but even more telling is that the person who initiates the visit each time is different. It’s also notable that Seong-jun only plays the piano the first two times — a call-back to his piano playing in Hahaha, with his friend remarking that he shouldn’t try to play and his female companion saying that he’s really good — and that the shot of Ye-jeon’s back as she returns from her errand does the same. Likewise, she’s received with good humor the first two times, drinking with the customers, and is berated on the third.

Therefore, The Day He Arrives isn’t just a case of repetitions with slight variations throughout, but something truly protean in its approach to characters and how they’re emphasized. Seong-jun wishes in voiceover that Ye-jeon would join him outside, and Bo-ram steps out just after. In the same shot she remarks that Joong-won seems quiet and Seong-jun describes him as a big chatterbox; in the next shot he’s pontificating about extremes. Young-ho doesn’t pick up the phone in the first and last days, but is very close with Seong-jun in the second and third. I had totally forgotten about the scenes with just the two of them at the library — where Seong-jun’s description of him getting lost after following a girl home as a teenager very aptly describes the film’s narrative arc, he is always arriving but never quietly passes through Seoul — and at his apartment. However, he seems much more interested in trying to subtly court Bo-ram in the fourth; weirdly, the structure of the third and fourth day restaurant and bar interactions seem to be flipped (the reading people scene comes before the argument).

It’s definitely worth returning to the first day — assuming, of course, that these are laid out in an order meant to be understood as “chronological” — in seeing how it differs from the rest. The drinking session and sudden turn on the film students initially seems to come from an earlier Hong, but both the farcical extremity of Seong-jun running away from them and the pan back to them, holding as they wonder what they did wrong, is new territory, a greater attention to those surrounding the main character that also is enhanced by the later shot that holds on them in the fourth day. The scene with Kyung-jin, on the other hand, is one of the greatest Hongian breakdowns, especially since it progresses so quickly and cuts away as they hold each other, a totally ambiguous conclusion that lays the groundwork for the text messages that, against his wishes in this first day, she sends to him. If there is a narrative element that seems to float above the timeline of the film, it is these short texts, full of enough longing that they haunt the rest of the film. There’s also a measured pace to how Hong holds on the first shot of them, waiting for the electronic lock to finish before cutting away, that makes time stand still for just a moment.

Hong’s filming style generally doesn’t require many takes, which is why hearing once that the coincidences scene took far more takes than normal because Yoo had trouble remembering the more theoretical language greatly amused me. It first and foremost acts as a more speculative version of Jung-rae’s script idea in Woman in the Beach, while also calling back to, in its invocation of stringing together random events to constitute a reason, the impromptu Q&A in Oki’s Movie. Most importantly though, it emphasizes the almost invisible threads that run throughout the film, the search for reason (despite the innumerable obstacles in the way) that constantly eludes characters and viewer alike. Indeed, this applies to Hong’s working method too: it’s totally unknown to us (and at least to some extent to him) what influences him to write on the day of filming, and it produces these scenes that, in turn makes the viewer question what is the reason for these events.

The odd generosity of spirit afforded to every character in this, from the students to Joong-won, exists hand-in-hand with its ultimately despairing outlook. Kyung-jin asks for two cigarettes and Seong-jun gives her four; Seong-jun calls Ye-jeon an angel, a descriptor also used in Like You Know It All and Hahaha; Ye-jeon makes three promises to Seong-jun — to meet lots of nice people, to not get drunk, to keep a diary — and he exorts her (repeated from his parting with Kyung-jin) to be strong. Those moments, in their own comparatively gentle way, still nevertheless have the same uncanny repetition as the moment where Seong-jun seems to remember the first kiss with Ye-jeon while she does not; Go mentions that she uses her photographs as a diary; and of course the whole events of final day.

After those two longing looks, one from Ye-jeon before she goes back inside and one from Seong-jun before he walks away from Novel for the first time in daylight, The Day He Arrives resets one more time. He enacts the same string of coincidences that Bo-ram mentioned earlier, meeting a producer (regular Gi Ju-bong, hilariously wearing sunglasses during snowfall), a director — Baek Jong-hak, the male lead of The Power of Kangwon Province, and a music producer (edit: Baek Hyeon-jin, who reappears in Yourself and Yours). But he doesn’t get to complete the sequence, instead last seen standing in front of one of those brick walls that have surrounded him during this entire film. As perfect as this last scene is, I found myself even more drawn to the scene of all five main characters waiting for taxis after the third day — the first of the great Hongian trailers features this scene in color and played backgrounds. While cabs do eventually come for all but Seong-jun and Ye-jeon, they are all stuck waiting for so long, gazing into the distance as Seong-jun does so much in the film. Seong-jun is left outside and stranded in the cold, only accompanied by the circular piano theme that revolves forever in his and my head, never truly arriving to a conclusion. If Hong’s universe allows for infinite worlds possible, it’s perfect that his most ardently loved is the one that’s so compact and yet never ends.