English Title: Yourself and Yours
Korean Title: 당신자신과 당신의 것/Dangsinjasingwa dangsinui geot
Premiere Date: September 12, 2016
U.S. Release Year: 2020
Festival: Toronto, San Sebastian (Best Director)
Film Number: 18
First Viewing Number: 7
First Viewing Date: May 24, 2017
Viewing Number: 4
Ranking (at beginning of run): 1
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 21
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 7
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 1
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 86 minutes (19th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear, possibly four unequal unmarked parts
Recurring Actors: Yoo Joon-sang (eighth appearance), Kim Eui-sung (sixth appearance), Kwon Hae-hyo (second appearance), Baek Hyeon-jin (second appearance), Lee Yoo-young (first appearance), Gong Min-jeong (first appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny, rainy
Alcohol: Makgeolli, Max beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Iced coffee, water
Food: Watermelon, pollock, noodle soup, spaghetti, salad, chips, squid
Drinking Scenes: 5
Creative People: Painter, film director, writer
Academia: N/A
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: 2
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 1
Family: Son-mother
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 1
Number of Shots: 43
Number of Zooms: 17 out, 15 in
Music Style: Upbeat strings and tambourine, upbeat piano and horn and drum
Title Background: Gray paper/Black background with white text for closing credits
Voiceover: 1 (text message only)

Yourself and Yours has been my favorite Hong ever since I first saw it. I actually thought it was my fourth Hong, the one I saw after the first time where I understood what he was going for, Right Now, Wrong Then, but it was actually my seventh; by that SIFF screening I already loved and appreciated his work. But something about it, perhaps it being my first Hong in a theater, and perhaps aided by the guy a few seats over from me rocking back and forth in his chair at how annoyed he was at not understanding what was going on, totally transformed my perception of Hong. Sure, there’s an implicit urge to defend and champion the underappreciated works, even for a perennially underappreciated director like Hong — though I always cherish how it’s the other shared Hong in the top 3 of the Seattle Screen Scene trio of Sean, Evan, and I. I’ve always thought of the film as the forgotten one as the Kim Min-hee train began rolling, premiering randomly at TIFF and not getting distributed until Cinema Guild released it in 2020. But every time I watch it, I feel like my understanding changes and my total adoration deepens further. If this is my north star for Hong, the film that will always act as the representative of everything I love about him, it only shines the brighter with my fundamentally refreshed perspective on him, while still retaining the wondrous, inexplicably heart-melting core that it’s always had for me.

This is definitely one of the Hongs that I’ve discussed most with friends, so I’m not beginning with anything new by stating outright that this is Hong’s comedy-of-remarriage, or I guess comedy-of-recoupling to put it more accurately. The difference between the only other Hong that centers around a couple (if just structurally) that reforms at the end, The Power of Kangwon Province, isn’t just the difference between early Hong and middle Hong, but also the difference between someone who sees relationships as doomed and someone who sees relationships as full of boundless possibilities.

What makes Yourself and Yours so bewildering, even for those who love Hong, is that it’s maybe the only film of his that has an identifiable narrative gambit that isn’t inherent in the structure. While the film uses three cuts-to-black that don’t specifically signal a change in part, something that I don’t think he’s done anywhere else — one could speculate as to whether Min-jeong shifts identity during these junctures, though I don’t think so — there’s no other apparent structure that guides the film, though there are certain jumps that radically upset the viewer’s sense of the world of the film as surely as Min-jeong’s personas.

Speaking of which, I’ve come to feel on this watch that Yourself and Yours, even among people who adore it, is perhaps too much talked about in terms of wondering whether Min-jeong is telling the truth, whether she’s making it all up, and especially the confident assertion that she has a twin. As she says, in response to Sang-won’s feelings of anxiety, mystery, and fun, “knowing things is not as important as you think. Don’t you think?” a slyly paradoxical pair of sentences that nevertheless gets to the heart of this film and Hong’s work at large.

Indeed, the precise nature of each of her deceptions — which reminded me much more of a Rivettian heroine this time, toying with men through performance — actually shifts between parts. Min-jeong actually first appears on screen independently of Yeong-soo — they only share seven shots in the whole film, and two of them are part of a dream sequence — and, after first denying Jae-yong’s certainty that he’s seen her before, claims that she’s Min-jeong’s twin, an event which, contrary to my memory, happens before the couple’s separation, i.e. the separation is not directly responsible for this bit of persona swapping. Later, Min-jeong doesn’t offer any kind of claim of being a twin to Sang-won or to Yeong-soo when he finally catches up with her. While it’s fun to think that Min-jeong does actually have a twin who got in a fight at the Goldstar bar and may or may not substitute in during some of the scenes — I’ve thought that many times, and anything is possible in the world of Hong — I’ve now come around to another point of view, which only deepens the film for me.

But before getting to that, in the manner of Yourself and Yours which manages to fill a whole multiverse of loose ends, there’s so much that goes on around this relationship. Initially foregrounded is Yeong-soo’s ailing mother who refuses to eat; Yeong-soo, provided he kept his plans, goes to see her in the day-long gap when he also sustained his left foot injury. The initial discussion between him and Joong-haeng is fittingly downbeat and serious, only happening to veer into the rumor about Min-jeong which directly stems from Yeong-soo’s interest in marrying her. Later, Joong-haeng suggests that Yeong-soo is in a slightly crazy mood because of his mother, though it’s left purposely unclear whether she’s died, worsened, or merely in the state of refusal that she’s currently in, a structuring absence among so many.

Largely because of Evan’s formulation, which I generally agree with, I’ve seen Yourself and Yours as, by virtue of existing in the gaps between Hong’s first film with Kim and the rest of his ongoing collaboration, being in some ways haunted by her presence, where the absence of a centering character like her allows for more exploration and opportunities; I even wrote a Two Cents capsule for Reverse Shot about it. I still agree with that to some degree, though as I talked about yesterday I think there’s a lot more exploration in Right Now, Wrong Then than I gave it credit for.

One presence that Yourself and Yours definitively and retroactively feels haunted by, though, is Kim Joo-hyuk, who with Lee Yoo-young conceivably turn in the two greatest Hong performances ever, and certainly the best by non-regulars (Lee’s only appeared in one other to date). There’s an especially tragic reason for that: after the two of them started dating a few months after the film premiered, Kim died in a car accident a year later. His presence, which now to me feels like a significantly more self-aware and empathetically pitiable Lee Sun-kyun character, has always stuck with me, a more purposefully depressive take on the Hongian man. Some of this, of course, stems from his foot injury and the slow walking on crutches he has to do, which this time reminded me of nothing less than Chen Shiang-chyi in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. But his entire manner and loneliness are already moving even before this tragic occurrence; it’s like watching Leslie Cheung for me now, an inherent sadness that even extends to his funniest moments.

Make no mistake, Yourself and Yours is among the funniest Hongs to me, but it’s also one of the saddest, both going to extremes and then coming back to an equilibrium of unbelievably heightened emotion. The bedroom argument is among the rawest scenes Hong’s ever done, in large part because of its pacing, a continual shared inability to trust, though this time I found myself understanding Min-jeong much more than I had before. At least initially, Lee’s performance is fairly reminiscent of Jung Yu-mi’s characters, who Sean once cited as essentially acting as a female version of the Hongian man — with her unique twists of course; it’s also worth bringing up that the other time someone tried to get their partner to moderate their drinking was Jin-gu and his wife in Oki’s Movie, the gender is flipped here — but in this instance, unlike basically any other Hong to date, a greater sense of a relationship’s history bears down upon the argument, a series of recriminations and accusations that, at this juncture, can’t be resolved. That this is the first view of a couple, of an awful argument that, ultimately, boils down to lack of trust and the inability of Yeong-soo to decide whether to believe his friends or Min-jeong, simmers underneath everything to follow; the zoom-in as Yeong-soo collapses on his face is maybe Hong’s most singularly stunning.

I appreciated more this time how Kim Eui-sung as Joong-haeng seems to be playing a far kinder but more morose version of the friend he played in Hill of Freedom; he exists at the periphery of many scenes, cautiously going along with Yeong-soo on his visits and in general almost acting as the Hongian man version of a counselor, a veteran giving the new star advice on how to proceed; in that sense the view of love that he tries to impart to Yeong-soo while they’re drinking together comes from the perspective of the Hongian man who thinks everything in life is necessary, while Yeong-soo espouses a more whole-hearted, almost innocent or chivalrous view of a love that overshadows all. The first visit to Min-jeong’s house, with the nearly subliminal dream that takes place in one shot and the extended wondering about the running meter, is as funny and mundane as the next shot, of Min-jeong perhaps coming out to see who was there, perhaps just an imagination of her on Yeong-soo’s part, is spectral.

I forgot that there are actually two visits to the dress shop where Min-jeong works, though I’ve never forgotten that Hong holds on the shot as the worker there takes off the mannequin’s arms and then the dress, leaving it a bare torso; I’ve always thought of it in some way as related to the Venus de Milo, though I suppose Winged Victory of Samothrace is an equally likely possibility. After Yeong-soo walks away from the store, there’s an ambiguous shot of Min-jeong eating an Italian meal; of course it’s intended partly to underscore her subsequent claim to Sang-won that she hasn’t eaten, but it also acts as an odd potential reverse shot, Min-jeong potentially seeing Yeong-soo and deciding not to let him know she’s close. There’s also a totally random zoomed-in, out-of-focus shot of a pigeon right before Min-jeong tells Jae-young that she’s not interested in him anymore; there haven’t been many definitive breakups in Hong, and it’s incredibly funny that Kwon is on the receiving end.

In general, Kwon Hae-hyo, after already turning in a terrific performance in In Another Country, makes his decisive move into Hong’s company with ease; the first shot of him alone, unfolding his ridiculous bike and riding away, along with the zoom-in on him as he spots Min-jeong, is hilarious; his hair also seems to have rapidly grayed in just four years which makes his interactions with everyone else much funnier. It’s also very well worth noting that in both first meetings over iced coffee, Min-jeong appears to be reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which may have even inspired/caused her persona changes.

After Right Now, Wrong Then, which foregrounds the outsider status of its two leads, Yourself and Yours goes a great ways in establishing a stable, preexisting community with frequent interactions that probably only exists in his film school films, though artistry is subordinated here to relationships. Baek Hyeon-jin, the music producer from the end of The Day He Arrives, reappears here as the bartender, and his random gossip with other regulars about Min-jeong and his seeming willingness to play devil’s advocate is just delightful; I really love how separate the bar and the table feel in terms of space, as if the regulars are looking through a telescope at first Jae-young and then Sang-won, the two outsiders. Especially in his “section” of the film, Jae-young almost feels like our avatar in the film, someone tossed into the web of relationships and who can’t make heads or tails of it.

Something I noticed this time around is that, aside from Joong-haeng, Yeong-soo seems to be almost exclusively surrounded by strong, even tough women. There’s the woman who works at the dress shop, but there’s also the first two times he’s at the pollock restaurant. Young-soo’s friend’s quote “drink up, you pathetic men” is probably among the most deservedly beloved Hong lines — and a callback to Hahaha — and her casual dismissal of the differences between men and women, so central to Hong’s films before, is if not a sea change then an introduction of another perspective, which in some ways becomes crucial to the coda of the film. But there’s also the woman with the eye patch, who helps transpose Min-jeong’s narrative onto Yeong-soo’s current state by making him also wonder if he’s seen her before, with another mention of Hongik University to boot; it’s also brought up that Yeong-soo was once a womanizer himself, though it seems like he’s changed. Her left eye injury is of course implicitly connected with his left leg injury, and this time her inviting him to drink with her friends reminded me of when Seong-jun accepted in The Day He Arrives, which was also a makgeolli scene. He stays this time however, an acceptance of loneliness that extends to his vain attempt to text Min-jeong (which I had forgotten was in brief voiceover).

But what truly triggers the breakdown of categories of children and wolves, Min-jeong or her twin, even between man and woman (and what constitutes a “truly impressive man”), comes from the most unexpected and delightful of sources, Jae-young and Sang-won discovering each other. It’s always been one of the funniest Hong scenes to me, doubly so because they’re two of Hong’s great regulars (though Kwon predictably is actually older than Yoo), and the way they slowly realize each other’s identities after nearly coming to blows and engaging in basically a pissing contest is so amazing, as is the brief cut back after the couple leaves to them giddily reminiscing about their school days and the apparent drinking that middle school students got up to; it’s a type of friendship and male bonding that Hong usually doesn’t portray in such an unadulterated form.

What I really keyed in on this time, though, was Min-jeong’s extremely emotional reaction, along with her almost seeming to recognize Joong-haeng as she goes into the restroom. This time, I felt as if the collision and quick resolution of the two men she’s spent time with in the past few days was a shock to her system, a realization of the possibilities of rapprochement that she had been denying for the past week or so, causing her to temporarily drop her persona and lose the too-emotional insecurity that she had been embodying on with Sang-won, not to mention the confidence with Jae-young; all of this is sustained so brazenly and uncannily throughout the film that it’s truly astonishing to see it crumble virtually in the background.

Each of the last three scenes, on this watch, feels among the greatest film scenes I’ve ever seen, especially in both Hong’s writing and Kim and Lee’s acting. They all strike such a tentative, intimate balance, constantly shifting in terms of who has the initiative and in how much each is willing to give to the other person. What’s so striking is that Yeong-soo calls her Min-jeong far less than I remembered; his willingness to simply ask who she is, rather than the repeated insistence that the two men had before, ties so deeply into the nature of relationships, into how, as he said before, he tried to fully understand her; before, he fell into the trap of the Hongian man, using all these descriptions that might as well come from Our Sunhi to capture someone who, in her shifting personas, can’t be pinned down. This time, he only slips up a few times in even trying to assign her a name, which she never gives. It reminded me this time of the last part of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy; where it differs is in the total uncertainty of it, the way Min-jeong seems to resume being herself, asking what happened between them, and then rejecting it again, an interplay and a cautious negotiation that boils down to one thing: without Min-jeong or whoever looks like her, Yeong-soo has lost his direction. Just as he is curious in her, she is curious in him, a two-way street that extends to his plea to be able to try to hear everything about it even though she thinks he can’t bear it. Min-jeong’s assertion that she hasn’t done anything wrong could apply to so many things: to the Goldstar bar, to her running around with the two men, or even another universe of personal failings; “that’s how I’ve always lived.” This is all rectified by that most Hongian of requests: to get a drink, though unlike Min-jeong’s immortal quote they don’t drink to get drunk.

Instead, they end up in bed together, with their places in the bed swapped this time. There’s almost a fluidity of genders here and throughout, or at least gender roles: Min-jeong is the first to compliment Yeong-soo’s appearance, saying he’s cute; he says earlier that he had cried at the pollack restaurant before unprompted. The entire scene almost plays like a recitation of wedding vows; even though they had mutually agreed not to make promises, everything here is in some ways an affirmation: for him to believe in her — Yeong-soo finally makes the choice for his love rather than his friends which he couldn’t make before, to put his trust in real love instead of words and formalities — for her to maybe love him if what he says comes true, for him to never hurt her. What’s so key here is the tentativeness that signals a new beginning; even here they seem to slip and out of “character,” sometimes saying it’s the first time and sometimes implying a past history, though they end up both agreeing that no matter what, it feels like the first time. There’s also the strange ringing that Min-jeong hears briefly, which I swear gets very subtly overlaid on the soundtrack after she says it’s gone, as if she passed it on to Yeong-soo briefly, or even the viewer.

Then there’s the final shot, heralded by a rare but perfectly imperfect dissolve on the candle to indicate the passage of time. First, Yeong-soo wakes up alone; he had had two waking dreams before, one a beautiful reconciliation with the actual Min-jeong, and all signs, including dreams from Hongian men and women alike, point to this being another one, and it’s almost as if he recognizes that history himself in his slumped posture. Then Min-jeong comes in with a container of watermelon, which they agree is better than melons, which are sweeter, because these are more refreshing; they promise to eat it together often; Hong holds on this shot for seemingly a longer period of time, with little snatches of dialogue still under the music, before going to credits.

Each of these scenes feels like such a blessing to me, less a means of repudiating his past works than building on them and providing a better tomorrow. It’s so fitting to me that the truest romance in his films is rebuilt by one of his most inscrutable and outlandish conceits, where something so jarring is needed to reset their shared view of what a relationship means to them. Yeong-soo and Min-jeong talking so intimately, with so much joy and interest in each other’s eyes, is maybe the most gracious and loving image that Hong has ever conveyed.

English Title: Right Now, Wrong Then
Korean Title: 지금은맞고그때는틀리다/Jigeumeun-matgo-geuttaeneun-tteullida
Premiere Date: August 13, 2015
U.S. Release Year: 2016
Festival: Locarno (Golden Leopard, Best Actor)
Film Number: 17
First Viewing Number: 3
First Viewing Date: October 11, 2016
Viewing Number: 3
Ranking (at beginning of run): 5
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 20
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 3
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 5
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 121 minutes (5th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Two parts, heavy repetition
Recurring Actors: Yoo Joon-sang (seventh appearance), Gi Ju-bong (sixth appearance), Seo Young-hwa (fifth appearance), Youn Yuh-jung (fifth appearance), Jeong Jae-young (second appearance), Kim Min-hee (first appearance)
Season: Winter
Weather: Sunny, snowy
Alcohol: Soju, makgeolli
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, banana milk, tea (jujube, green organic), water
Food: Sushi, potatoes
Drinking Scenes: 4
Creative People: Film director and assistant and critic, painter, model, writer
Academia: Film students
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: 1 (off-screen)
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: 2 (1 off-screen)
Naps: 3
Family: Daughter-mother
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 1
Number of Shots: 49
Number of Zooms: 18 out, 29 in
Music Style: Calm synth strings, calm synth organ
Title Background: Gray background, yellow text/Black text for closing credits
Voiceover: 1 (first half)

It’s no exaggeration to say that Right Now, Wrong Then is the film that changed Hong’s career. For the first time since The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, he won the top prize at one of the big European festivals, a Golden Leopard win at Locarno that went some way in putting him back on the map. He received U.S. distribution for the first time since In Another Country; Grasshopper Film picking up the film seemed to galvanize Cinema Guild to resume distributing his films, which they’ve done for every film since after the next one. And of course, it’s the first film with Kim Min-hee, which has subsequently flourished into probably the greatest director-actor artistic and personal partnership since probably John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. As such, especially among some of my fellow Hong acolytes, it almost has a mixed reputation, where the film that made him big internationally once again is ever-so-slightly downplayed, seen as not among his best, and hit with the backhanded compliment “accessible.” Indeed, I’ve always recommended this as the best Hong for someone who hasn’t seen his films before to start with, and while it’s always been among my favorites I felt that it had less mystery or things that captivated me than most of his greatest work. But this watch changed that for me; if it’s now for me one of his true masterpieces, then it arises out of both what makes this such a change for him and how it fits so perfectly into his oeuvre.

I don’t mean to imply, of course, that those who love Right Now, Wrong Then but don’t really connect with other Hongs have an incorrect view about it; my newfound reading of the film is certainly molded by my deep immersion in his multiverse and my at-this-point entirely non-objective feelings towards his work, especially this one. But the idea that the second half of the film is a kind of wish fulfillment for Chun-su, or that he’s gained some kind of omniscience over the narrative, has never really gelled with my understanding of the film — I actually realized I hadn’t rewatched this film since 2017, even though I remember watching it more than just one-and-a-half times.

What I hadn’t connected, and didn’t really have context for before this new run-through, is how radically this is a Kim Min-hee film, or at least a shared Kim and Jeong Jae-young film rather than the other way around. Of course, I had grokked before that Kim is the first and the last person seen in the film, both from behind as she walks, and that she had a larger role than the average Hong woman; indeed, I was primed to look more at her in all the watches I’ve had. But Right Now, Wrong Then isn’t quite like Woman on the Beach, where the perspective seems to be fought over between Jung-rae and Mun-suk, or Oki’s Movie, where the point-of-view character is neatly handed off between parts — though like that film, this initially puts up another title, the perfectly inverted Right Then, Wrong Now, before showing the actual title later.

Instead, Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of true coexistence, where both Hee-jung and Chun-su are given substantial development simultaneously rather than in succession. Of course, one might argue that we only see Hee-jung alone/apart from Chun-su in her final scene in each respective part, and that the rest of the film takes place from Chun-su’s perspective; in the (small) film festival setting the film recalls Like You Know It All more than any other Hong. But saying that, first and foremost, downplays the utterly galvanizing effect Kim has when she first appears on screen. Unlike other Hongian women, who are either already known to the Hongian male, a friend, or the community, Hee-jung truly appears out of nowhere, only revealed with her banana milk — similar to the mysterious carton of milk in Oki’s Movie — after she sits down. This lack of prior context, merely a shy woman glimpsed rather than a past flame or a friend of a friend, leads the viewer to essentially discover her alongside Chun-su.

This process evokes, more powerfully than any film I can recall, the feeling that Hong likely had as he was falling in love with Kim; I don’t think their affair began until after filming ended, and as far as I know he didn’t have any publicized affairs until Kim — he got married at 25, two years earlier than Chun-su. But the sheer magnetism that Kim has from moment one makes it a much less clear-cut case than Chun-su projecting his attraction onto her. Instead, Chun-su’s perspective seems to be simultaneously intertwined with and totally incidental to Kim’s presence. For the first time, Hong seems to be consciously depicting the processes of thinking; even in their first interaction — Kevin B. Lee’s video essay on the film and these paired scenes was also influential for me early on — there’s a greater attention to Hee-jung’s decision-making, with her eye flashes and brief pauses registering on a much more evident level than past Hong characters while still feeling as integrated into the Hongian view of naturalism as anyone else; the zoom-ins on Hee-jung as Chun-su talks about his marriage as she slowly gets more glassy-eyed are as internal as anything Hong’s ever done.

Right Now, Wrong Then, especially in its second half, is quieter and more considered than any other Hong to date, where every interaction, including of course the two magnificent drinking scenes in the sushi restaurant, which run eight and twelve minutes respectively, is teased out a little more than before. This being my first viewing since keying in on the Rivettian nature of Hong, it only feels more apropos: the length a greater opportunity for play and for exploration, where the tiniest changes between the two parts set off a chain of revelations and considerations.

At the same time, this feels different from the kind of repetition found in, say, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate or In Another Country, although the former in some ways gets echoed by Chun-su being left out in the cold in the penultimate scene. Instead of an explicit opportunity to begin again, as in the latter, or another cycle, as in the former, the relationship between the two in their fundamentally identical shape elicits a more complicated response, a clarity of form that only deepens the mystery.

The odd thing about Right Now, Wrong Then is that it exists perfectly well in terms of the first half; I found myself getting surprisingly emotional through most of it, sensing the ardor that Hong feels for Kim. That the second half deepens it further is practically a given, but it doesn’t operate on the level of strict male fantasy that many seem to think. Chun-su gets into more trouble, embarrasses himself — the stripping scene is among the funniest and most extreme Hongian breakdowns — and even if he has a better relationship with Kim and Seong-gook by the end, he only gets kissed twice on the cheek. Instead, a few other readings seem more valid to me, the second one especially: that this is a dream but the dreamer is Hee-jung instead, with her wishing that things had gone better with him; or that this truly is a simple representation of another strand of the multiverse, where it is a random encounter and could stand on its own as surely as the first half could; or that this is even the same timeline but happening years later.

There is a certain omniscience or awareness of what transpired before that can certainly be read in, though I’d argue it applies to both characters — Hee-jung, despite casually smoking in the first half, has quit in the second and says that it’s no longer allowed in the studio; Chun-su explains in the last scene that she’s someone he “knew from before.” But the way that both Chun-su and Hee-jung talk in the second half seems hesitant rather than an active attempt to right wrongs; Hee-jung even says that Chun-su speaks without thinking, and his line of questioning in the café, asking about her father who isn’t mentioned at all in the first half, is in many ways a less tactful way of speaking than anything before.

So it isn’t merely enough to say that Right Now, Wrong Then is the happier/kinder/wish-fulfillment version of Right Then, Wrong Now, but instead a depiction of alternate possibilities that happen to have a somewhat different outcome, like a less overt take on In Another Country. The thing that I forgot most was Young-sil — Seo Young-hwa with shorter hair, seemingly playing her pre-Hill of Freedom sage-like roles in the first half and her more overtly romantic Hill of Freedom persona in the second, considering her attraction to Chun-su — not only bringing one of her books, but also writing an inscription about how she agrees with what he said: discovering what’s hidden in the surface of one’s life is the only way to overcome with one’s fears. That close-up on the book, and what it says about the preceding 50 minutes and what’s to come, is as moving and mysterious to me as the ending of the second half of the film. Likewise, maybe it’s just Jeong’s brilliant performance — his only leading Hong role, and his more sickly appearance than other past Hong men makes him perfect for underplaying so that Kim can take center stage — but I’m much less inclined to see what he’s saying. Both his words about Kim’s painting — which has a similar tenor to but is much more detailed than Seong-nam’s assessment of Yoo-jeong’s drawings in Night and Day — and his parting words to Bo-ra — Go Ah-sung, the young girl in The Host, a connection which has always delighted me, as does her sheer joy at being pulled around a sledding rink — seem to come from a more genuine place than mere platitudes. Perhaps it’s just Jeong’s watery eyes as he looks at both the painting and Kim — we don’t see the former in the second part, maybe it’s the same painting or maybe not — but, even if he uses the same words as he does to describe his own films, I could see it equally as indicating a unity of spirit, an alignment of artistic sensibilities that feels just as genuine and touching to me as the more critical accusations of falling prey to comfort and conventions — this progression is the opposite of the reference letters in Our Sunhi.

To go back to those drinking scenes, I find their subtly different stagings equally instructive. The first one places Kim much closer to the camera than the second, while Jeong stays in roughly the same spot. This is generally in keeping with the more reflective or pensive spirit of the second half, first signaled in the further distance and diagonal view of their first meeting the second time around. But it also had a profound effect on how I saw the scene. Even though the viewer sees more of Jeong’s face, in the first half it’s almost as if he provides a mirror for the viewer and for Hong, collectively unable to take their eyes off of her and her gestures — for how drunk they get, and considering that they apparently were actually drinking during the shots, they consume less soju bottles than the average Hong drinking scene, a measly three — and the moment of her whispering to Jeong is unexpectedly spine-tingling. The further proximity in the second balances the view a little more, allowing the viewer to gravitate more towards Jeong crying. The same occurs in the painting scenes, where Kim sits right in front of the camera the first time and is roughly on the same line with Jeong the second time; that second shot has maybe the smallest but most impactful focus-pulling I’ve seen in Hong, where Kim stays in focus but Jeong gets slightly blurred depending on how it’s adjusted.

I’m definitely tempted to just list out the differences between the two parts: the lack of voiceover in the second part; the scenes with Bo-ra in the first half and Chun-su’s attraction to her; the pan up to a tree to open and close the first and last shot of the first half, which is absent from the second; the use of Gi Ju-bong as Won-ho, who gets his own little shots of smoking during the second half; the Q&A with Seong-gook (Yoo Joon-sang) which really doesn’t go as badly as Chun-su feels but which gets the priceless accusations of him being pretentious, ignorant, and unworthy of being a film critic. There’s also the metatextual nature of, for instance, Youn Yuh-jung as Deok-soo, returning for the last time, as a mother, essentially being the bridge between Jung Yu-mi and Kim Min-hee’s tenures; Kangwon Province is mentioned again as well. (I’m pretty sure one of Hong’s films isn’t playing at the end, though of course there is similar piano music.) I also hadn’t noticed before that the Buddhist bell rings during the last shot of Kim in the first half and during their first meeting in the second half, almost a kind of benediction of this new occurrence.

But to get back to perspective, both parts feel like two-way discoveries, with Chun-su and Hee-jung discovering each other over the course of their interactions, with little else to worry about. The nature of his visit (despite not being a vacation) and their both being strangers to each other engenders a lack of an overt goal to their interactions — like in Hill of Freedom, which to me now forms a neat trilogy of shifting perspectives with this and Yourself and Yours — with them feeling free to push and pull each other to different places, her especially taking initiative to go to the café gathering. If I had to pick one thing, I’d say that the first half is about Hee-jung discovering who Chun-su is, and the second half vice versa, but what makes Right Now, Wrong Then so remarkable is that both occur simultaneously, and that the development of both resets narratively, yet continues in the viewer’s mind, an endlessly generative process that profoundly moved me this time around.

To close, a few lines from their interactions really stuck with me, reminding me of other Hong films while also pointing the way forward. While there are extremely soju-fueled but charming declarations of love, including the found ring that Hee-jung is wearing at the end of the film, what registers even more is the gratitude, the way that they both say they will cherish their memory of this experience. It reminds me of a more positive spin on the second-to-last day of The Day He Arrives, where Seong-jun and Ye-jeon resolve to never see each other again but to always have fond memories; there is no such explicit promise here, but there’s an air of finality and wistfulness that, in light of the irresolution of before, feels genuinely happy. The relative formality of their conversation in the snow — startlingly played backwards in the trailer — is then transcended by Hee-jung taking off her glove and their bare hands touching, her words “thank you for everything” standing for so much unspoken and unacted upon. In the last conversation, they say they are glad to have gotten to know each other, and it’s that kind of intimacy, not necessarily sexual or romantic, that truly grabs me in the film; her vow to watch his films from now on functions in a similar manner, a reciprocation of his honest assessment of her paintings which reflect her loneliness and desire for comfort. In the last shot, Kim at last walks out by herself, into a future of infinite worlds possible; even if this were her only Hong though, it would be among his greatest.

English Title: Hill of Freedom
Korean Title: 자유의 언덕/Jayuui Eondeok
Premiere Date: September 2, 2014
U.S. Release Year: 2020
Festival: Venice (Orizzonti)
Film Number: 16
First Viewing Number: 4
First Viewing Date: February 11, 2017
Viewing Number: 3
Ranking (at beginning of run): 7
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 19
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 4
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 7
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 66 minutes (26th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Achronological epistolary
Recurring Actors: Kim Eui-sung (fifth appearance), Gi Ju-bong (fifth appearance), Moon So-ri (fifth appearance), Seo Young-hwa (fourth appearance), Youn Yuh-jung (fourth appearance), Jung Eun-chae (second appearance), Lee Min-woo (second appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny, rainy
Alcohol: Red wine (Cabernet Sauvignon), soju, beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Iced coffee, instant coffee, water
Food: Watermelon, ravioli, cake, Korean barbecue, noodle soup, shrimp
Drinking Scenes: 3
Creative People: Theater/film actress, producer
Academia: Language institute teachers
Vacation: 1
Dream Sequences: 1-2
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Nephew-aunt
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 1
Number of Shots: 70
Number of Zooms: 16 out, 11 in
Music Style: Light piano
Title Background: Yellow background, blue text
Voiceover: 3

The first Hong feature that can properly be regarded as a mid-length film, Hill of Freedom, has always been a source of fascination for me. The first one I saw after that three-day stretch, and the first one I saw with Evan or indeed any other person, it’s in many ways the template for how people who came to Hong during his late period (like myself) think of his films: a clear yet elliptical structure, a compact runtime, and a happier — or at least less damning — conclusion than the rejection of his male protagonists in his early period. All of this is true, and I already really loved it on my first two viewings. But having watched many more of his films now, I’ve come to appreciate even more how special it is, how speedy and light it is from construction on down while still leaving so much possibility floating around.

First of course, there’s the predominant use of English; In Another Country might edge Hill of Freedom out if only because it has twenty more minutes, but otherwise this is the Hong most dedicated to exploring the way people communicate in languages they aren’t very familiar with. Huppert has something of a command of English despite it being a second language, but all of the characters here speak haltingly — except for the White guy who runs the popular bar and also speaks Korean fluently; don’t know if he’s credited but his scene is hilarious all the same — and much of the comedy comes from this very hesitancy, the way it forces them to express themselves in plainer and more direct methods.

There’s also the foregrounding of Mori, played by Kase Ryō, who’s acted in no less than five of the most significant films of the last decade — this, Like Someone in Love, Silence, To the Ends of the Earth, The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) — and has, almost like Huppert, a cinephile’s sense for working with brilliant filmmakers from around the world. His performance here, interestingly, doesn’t aim to foreground his Japanese ethnicity, and neither does Hong. Each time someone tries to talk in Korean to him, he says that he can’t speak Korean rather than say that he’s Japanese. Despite the conversation with Gu-ok — Youn Yuh-jung, running a guest house in almost a similar manner to her film-daughter Jung Yu-mi in In Another Country — about the differences between Koreans and Japanese (described as nice, polite, and clean) and the later observation that he almost seems more Korean than Japanese, this issue isn’t truly broached. His conversations rest more on regular small talk — the business or pleasure question never gets old — with his Japanese identity seeming to matter much less than his status as a vacationer, like other Hong outsider protagonists.

Where Mori does differ, especially from the likes of Lee Sun-kyun and Kim Sang-kyung’s roles, is his fundamental gentleness and self-aware pity, in a manner even greater than Yoo Jun-sang’s characters — the film, like the one solo-Yoo-led The Day He Arrives, takes place in Bukchon. He adopts almost a sort of lost fatalism, where he accepts even from the beginning that he’ll alright whether or not he is able to meet and reconnect with Kwon — Seo Young-hwa in her largest role in a Hong yet — and accepts things with a passivity. He isn’t able to, say, confront Kwang-hyun (Lee Min-woo in basically the same obnoxious role as Our Sunhi) about his overbearing behavior or make sense of the (much funnier to me now) arguments around him. This isn’t to say that he’s not capable of wide emotional swings like other Hong protagonists: he’s incredibly despondent under the influence of wine and may or may not have fought someone to protect a woman; his voiceover is especially strong in this manner, calling himself stupid for getting involved with Young-sun and the comedic edit from him resolving to lay out all the facts to him sleeping with her again. But the appropriate lasting image is of him stuck in Young-sun’s restroom, helplessly trapped but much calmer than other Hong characters would be.

I know a number of people who have talked about Hill of Freedom‘s structure as almost a puzzle to be solved, even speculating about a possible chronological edit that could be made of it, minus of course the letter that gets lost — I remembered the dissolve as Kwon collects the letters but not the rapidity of the whole scene, the sudden slump she has on the stairs and the quick zoom-in on that last piece of paper. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that such thinking misses the point, I appreciated for the first time just how elegantly the film is structured. First, there’s the first letter of Mori checking in at the guesthouse and meeting Young-sun — Moon So-ri again — and her *adorable* dog Gumi — which appropriately means Dream, especially for such a light Hong — at The Hill of Freedom, which I had totally forgotten came before the letters are mixed-up. Then, there are two successive letters which clearly delineate a backwards progression of time and causation: Young-sun taking Mori out to dinner out of gratitude for finding Gumi, then Mori finding Gumi. This is then upended by the next letter, the first (and only onscreen) time Mori and Kwang-hyun meet, which could take place at any time before the preceding event, days or weeks; Mori says he’ll probably stay around two weeks, but it could certainly be much longer, since at least a week passes between his last letter and Kwon’s return.

What the achronology emphasized for me this time around — aside from neatly tying into the book that Mori keeps reading, Time, and how it’s merely a projection that we produce as our brains evolved, not unlike the differences between men and women — is just how much Hill of Freedom becomes a film about quotidian life, albeit delimited by Mori’s underlying mission to reconnect with Kwon and his pending return to Japan; the frequent interactions at the guest house and the café make the spaces even more familiar than the campuses in the Jung Yu-mi films or the restaurant in Hahaha, establishing a cozy sort of feeling to the film’s spaces. At the same time, there are so many jagged ends that, thanks to the achronological structure, go down much smoother than in a traditional narrative: the amazing dream, where someone is singing Mori’s name as he runs his hand through a stream; the wait at the bar for the beer that never comes; Mori’s line at the end of a letter that someone was lucky to go to the toilet; and of course the entire arc with Nam-hee.

This being the only Hong Jung Eun-chae has been in aside from Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, it’s very tempting to think of Nam-hee as more-or-less the same character; after all, her father was never seen in that film, and Haewon might have fled to escape her situation with Seong-joon. This might be saying too much — Gi Ju-bong, the sage-like figure who gave her makgeolli, is her dad here and brings her back remarkably calmly and without speaking a word of English to Mori — but there’s an odd sense of suspension to her scenes. This of course comes in her shouting match with Sang-won, which I found much funnier this time in its extremity, the one rancorous rupture in the otherwise lovely and light film, and which acts as the exact opposite of their interactions in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon; it’s mentioned that Sang-won came back from America recently, where Joong-won was a professor, and he has the same amazement at someone else’s cigarette strength compared to his 1 mg as in “50:50” — Mori smokes 8mg, while Moon So-ri smoked 6 mg. There’s also the appearance of Nam-hee’s possible lover Yeom-gu — Jeong Yong-jin, Hong’s regular composer during this time — and that time when Mori sees her in a shop, sans suitcase and seemingly much less troubled; it’s deliberately unclear whether this comes before or after her previous scene.

One of the greatest tricks that Hill of Freedom pulls, even more effortlessly than the rest of the film, is how Hong, maybe for the first time, creates two equally desirable romantic outcomes almost without even really trying. A lot of this comes down to perfect casting: Moon So-ri has been a Hong stalwart for the past few years, and her steady management of The Hill of Freedom and kind behavior towards Mori, along with the genuine intimacy of their conversations in bed together, while Seo Young-hwa has always maintained something of an ethereal presence in his films. Even when she’s reading the letters — this is the first feature since Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors to have more shots than there are minutes in the film, a direct result of the cutaways to Kwon moving on to another letter — she operates at a slight remove, almost as the constructor of the film structure, existing both inside and outside of the story in much the same way as Jung in In Another Country. Since I generally take the charmingly pathetic Mori at his word — he’s as prone to sleep as Haewon, though I don’t think he actually naps in the film, just sleeps for long periods of time — I believe him when he expresses his great respect for her, which comes through both as his projection and in the wise face that Seo always brings to Hong.

Thus, it’s only fitting that Hill of Freedom has two endings, one absurdly conclusive with the now recovered Kwon and one typically open-ended with Young-sun; I adore both but prefer the grace the first allows for. The first then offers the possibility that the last scene is some other liaison with Young-sun, or perhaps actually the missing letter; I had thought before that it was the fight Mori gets into, but I’m fairly certain it happened after the final letter was left at the language institute since his wound (again on the left side of his face as in Like You Know It All and Nobody’s Daughter Haewon) is still somewhat fresh and Sang-won and Gu-ok took him out to dinner in gratitude. I’m not exactly sure where it would be then, maybe even after the first post-jumble letter when they’re drinking wine, but it makes the dream less clear-cut than might reasonably be assumed.

The other, probably more common interpretation is that Mori dreamed this first ending where he starts a family with two children in Japan, which then begs the question of exactly how much was a dream: did Kwon actually return from the mountains and read the letters? Did Mori actually get in a fight since he doesn’t have any facial injuries? What matters ultimately is that Mori will stay in Seoul and go back to sleep, still seeing Young-sun and perhaps waiting for the person he respects most in the world. The thing that separates this from The Day He Arrives, and indeed most other Hongs, even the other middle period ones, is that Hill of Freedom is a truly pleasant place to be in, where bonds can be established with people over drinks, cigarettes, and flowers, where lightness doesn’t have to require tidiness.

English Title: 50:50
Korean Title: N/A
Premiere Date: August 21, 2013
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: Venice
Film Number: N/A
First Viewing Number: N/A
First Viewing Date: June 23, 2017
Viewing Number: 3
Ranking (at beginning of run): N/A
Ranking (at end of run): N/A
Film Number (including shorts): 10
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 10
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 29
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 2 minutes (29th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear
Recurring Actors: Kim Eui-sung (fourth appearance), Moon So-ri (fourth appearance), Seo Young-hwa (third appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny
Alcohol: N/A
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: N/A
Food: N/A
Drinking Scenes: N/A
Creative People: N/A
Academia: N/A
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Husband-wife
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: N/A
Number of Shots: 2
Number of Zooms: 1 out, 0 in
Music Style: Light piano
Title Background: Last shot, blue letters
Voiceover: N/A

It might almost be too silly to write about “50:50,” Hong’s contribution to Venice 70: Future Reloaded, an omnibus film made for the Venice Film Festival’s 70th anniversary that enlisted seventy filmmakers to make a short film between a minute and a minute and a half long on “their interpretation of the future of cinema.” Running twenty minutes shorter than Hong’s other shorts, to say nothing of even his slimmest features, and taking place in only two shots, it would appear to be too slight to even consider among his actual body of work. But just as Hong’s trailers and other ephemera (which I’ll likely cover, albeit not as their own entries) form a surprising place in his filmography, so does “50:50,” which I might be overvaluing but which is so compact to me that I can’t help but love it.

Despite probably having been shot the summer it actually premiered, there’s a concision and preciseness of writing that doesn’t strain to reveal itself in the conversation between Kim Eui-sung and Moon So-ri. First, his surprise at the strength of her cigarette; she describes it as being “right for her.” Then, the casualness of Kim saying that Seo Young-hwa — who appears to be his wife though this isn’t stated outright — might die, among the most flippant mentions of death in Hong’s work, along with the starkness of the odds she has to live. Then, Moon compliments Kim by saying he’s considerate; he responds that he should be since he doesn’t earn much, and then she compliments him again by saying he looks well off enough. Finally, Moon points out that Kim should go and that Seo might be lonely; he agrees, but before he can go back the camera pans left to show Seo coughing by herself. Of course, at the start of this second shot Hong can’t resist throwing in just one zoom out.

This certainly is as clearly about the Hongian man as any of Hong’s work in this middle period, with all actors playing some version of their past characters: Kim as the slightly oblivious but earnest man, Moon as the concerned but charming woman, Seo as the slightly inscrutable but kindly woman. Nothing else of Hong’s traditional tropes are present — no drinking or food, no apparent creative people — just the simple act of sharing something illicit that can harm other people. The preciseness of the dialogue — though this barely comes in under 90 seconds — fills in all the information one needs to know about how these characters interact with each other, and those interactions, along with the slight twists in structure (most filmmakers likely wouldn’t include that last pan) capture Hong’s essence, as pure a distillation as his other shorts while also functioning as its standalone piece.

As for how “50:50” might interpret the future of cinema, I’m reminded of “Sax and Violins,” Talking Heads’ contribution to the Until the End of the World soundtrack; David Byrne, instead of trying to imagine how music would sound a decade onwards as per the prompt, decided to make something that sounded exactly like Talking Heads did at the time. I feel like Hong opted for a similar approach, entirely to the film’s benefit.

English Title: Our Sunhi
Korean Title: 우리 선희/Uri Seonhui
Premiere Date: August 10, 2013
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: Locarno (Best Director)
Film Number: 15
First Viewing Number: 6
First Viewing Date: April 30, 2017
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 19
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 17
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 6
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 20
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 89 minutes (17th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Three unequal parts
Recurring Actors: Jung Yu-mi (sixth appearance), Lee Sun-kyun (fifth appearance), Ye Ji-won (fourth appearance), Kim Sang-jung (second appearance), Han Jai (second appearance), Jeong Jae-yeong (first appearance), Lee Min-woo (first appearance)
Season: Autumn
Weather: Sunny, rainy
Alcohol: Soju, Cass beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, tea, water
Food: Fried chicken, dried fish, spicy squid, banchan
Drinking Scenes: 4
Creative People: Filmmakers
Academia: Film professor and students
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: N/A
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: N/A
Number of Shots: 42
Number of Zooms: 9 out, 13 in
Music Style: Upbeat piano, Korean song piano and xylophone
Title Background: Yellow/Blue text for closing credits (smeared Jeonwonsa logo)
Voiceover: Yes (only for reading letter)

I tend to subscribe more closely to the idea of slow cinema as an actual movement or general mode than most; while it’s absolutely the case that a Tsai, an Apichatpong, or a Diaz take much different approaches and often vary the way their own films are made, there is still a general sensibility that feels rather in common. But I’ve never quite understood why, at least at the start of his career, Hong was lumped in with slow cinema, or maybe more precisely the equally nebulous term Asian Minimalism. While it’s true that his sense of narrative is unconventional compared to the mainstream, and indeed his films have progressively been sidelined in South Korean circles at large, starting from the second half of the 2010s on, his films tend to feature a number of clearly definable scenes. None of the shots are too long, there are frequent emotional outbursts, and there’s little cutaways that break up the flow of conversation. That’s in part what makes Our Sunhi, the final entry in the Jung Yu-mi saga, so unexpected, a clear divergence that, since I saw it remarkably early in my first run-through of Hong, wasn’t aware of.

Our Sunhi can fairly be described as Hong’s first film approaching minimalism: with just 42 shots in an 89 minute film, it’s the first one where the average shot length is longer than two minutes. This isn’t to say that this doesn’t feel like a Hong film; in narrative, dialogue, and ultimate resolution, this fits rather snugly into this early-middle period, putting a definitive cap on this era of his filmmaking. But amidst this, there are two utterly remarkable scenes that begin like any other: people sitting and drinking together in a cafe; they end up both being just under twelve minutes long, a durational approach that Hong has never quite used before. Consequently, there are little pauses and gestures, as people appear to collect themselves, struggling to think of what next to say.

These scenes, of course, serve as neat repetitions of each other, with the fried chicken actually being delivered the second time and the recurring strands of conversation that run through the film brought up. But they’re also inverses: the scene between Mun-su and Jae-hak ends with a sort of détente in their debate, while the one between Sunhi/Seonhui and Jae-hak ends with them fully falling for each other. I also wonder if this is the first Hong where the actors are actually drinking on set. The only one I’m sure about is Right Now, Wrong Then, but both here and in the first drinking scene Lee Sun-kyun is absolutely incredible; he fumbles over his words when he talks about digging deeper and repeats it several times — given Hong’s dislike of improvisation I wonder whether that was written in the script — and generally exhibits an even greater belligerent confusion than the normal Hong drinker.

As both the last Jung Yu-mi Hong and the last Lee Sun-kyun Hong, watching Our Sunhi with that knowledge is almost a vastly different experience, everything feeling that much more final than the already extremely funny valence it had before. It’s also the second of two Hongs with Kim Sang-joong, with him given a much larger role than in The Day He Arrives; it’s tempting in some way to simply say that he has the Moon Sung-keun role from past Jung films, and indeed he has that semblance of favoritism; he’s the last man that she sees, and for all the viewer knows she could fully intend to meet up with him at a later time given his instructions for her to leave first.

New to the mix is Jung Jae-young, who immediately brings a new, almost more melancholic feeling to Hong; it’s certainly no accident that Jae-hak is the common participant in both of the extended shots. The shot of him in his apartment, the first time someone’s living space has been seen in Hong since The Day He Arrives, is darker than any other scene in the film even though it’s daylight outside. His appearance, too, is distinctive; it’s mentioned he’s been sick, which is brought up again in On the Beach at Night Alone, and he has a certain gauntness to his visage. In essence, that’s what makes his role in the film fascinating: he begins as something of a counselor for Mun-su, then a playful friend for Dong-hyun; he initially tries to be a source of reassurance for Sun-hi before succumbing to his attraction for her and the way she uses his own descriptions of her to describe him. By the closing scene, he’s become just another one of Sunhi’s admirers, as lost and besotted with her image as the rest of them.

In many ways Our Sunhi is easier to parse than other Hongs: the descriptors of Sunhi — odd, great artistic sense, smart, courageous, innocent, honest — are repeated enough, in both the two reference letters and in each of the men’s compliments of her, that even a Hong neophyte could probably understand the driving force behind them. What’s less obvious, in a generative way, is exactly how it pertains to Sunhi’s true character. It’s not true to say that she’s only seen in relation to the men, or that the film is merely accepting the projection of her like in an early Hong: her insistence on leaving when she feels like it — Sang-woo and his jokiness is a welcome loose end — and her way of adapting to each encounter, bettering her position in some way with each interaction, fits in with both the film and as a culmination of all of Jung’s characters. Crucially, the only true backstory we get about her is shrouded in mystery: she doesn’t get along well with peers due to some form of shyness and she can sometimes disappear for years at a time — part of me really hopes that Jung’s done just that with Hong, and that she can come back sometime down the line, maybe even opposite Kim Min-hee.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to determine what the Korean song that plays thrice during the film is; it almost reminds me of how Tsai uses Chinese oldies in his films, with a similar sentimentality that’s made inscrutable by their usage. Here, in particular with Mun-su’s scenes, it’s almost a mocking reminder of his inability to rekindle his relationship with Sunhi, in contrast to the communal chicken eating between Sunhi, Jae-hak, and Joo-hyun — Ye Ji-won, for once not partnered with Yoo Joon-sang. I also swear that Lee looks into the camera once or twice; whether alcohol-induced or not, it’s a fitting and odd send-off for one of Hong’s great recurring actors (who’s now somehow starred in an Best Picture Oscar-winning film).

If Our Sunhi (for me) brings to an end the streak of films from Night and Day to Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, a period of six years and seven truly masterful features, it’s through no fault of its own, and it’s as delightful and unexpected as many of Hong’s mid-tier work. I do have to wonder if Hong is describing his own work at least a little in Dong-hyun’s excessively fawning second reference letter for Sunhi: experimental pieces far from existing narratives, avoiding the trap of self-absorbed expressions, free from the constraints of certainty and finding poetic expression. If this represents an unexpected and quite successful experiment, it also results in one of his most Hongian endings: three men wandering Changgyeong Palace, looking for the woman they all see the same way, who’s already left behind a sign that literally says “Way Out.”

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.

English Title: Oki’s Movie
Korean Title: 옥희의 영화/Oghuiui yeonghwa
Premiere Date: September 11, 2010
U.S. Release Year: 2012
Festival: Venice (Orizzonti)
Film Number: 11
First Viewing Number: 17
First Viewing Date: March 4, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 12
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 12
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 20
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 12
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 80 minutes (21th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Four unequal parts/separate short films with three protagonists
Recurring Actors: Lee Sun-kyun (third appearance), Jung Yu-mi (third appearance), Moon Sung-keun (third appearance), Seo Young-hwa (second appearance), Kim Jin-kyung (second appearance), Shin Sun (first appearance)
Season: Winter (Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day)
Weather: Sunny, snowy, rainy
Alcohol: Cheongju, makgeolli, Cass beer, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, baijiu
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Milk, coffee, Coca-Cola, tea
Food: Seafood pancake, janchi-guksu, octopus, red bean bun, sandwich, dried squid, Chinese shrimp and bok choy, bean sprouts
Drinking Scenes: 6
Creative People: Filmmakers
Academia: Film professors and students
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: Yes (twice off-screen)
Films Within Films: 1-4
Q&A: 2
Naps: 2
Family: N/A
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: N/A
Number of Shots: 90
Number of Zooms: 25 out, 35 in
Music Style: Pomp and Circumstance (Elgar)
Title Background: Blue slide projector/Yellow background for closing credits (black text)
Voiceover: 4

Something that I didn’t truly appreciate about Hong until this viewing project is how his films maintain a similar level of ambiguity while subtly changing their methods of conveying that, especially across the early, middle, and late periods. The early periods, while certainly operating according to a clear structure, largely eschewed a full disruption of its diegesis, instead constructing repetitions through little events while keeping a comparatively comprehensible sense of narrative. The middle period films, or at least these first two features, instead totally disrupt conventions by making narrative drive come through decisive junctures that nevertheless flow together; the mystery instead comes from conversation, from the puzzle-like nature of relating them to character. Oki’s Movie is the clearest example yet, something which almost threw me the first time even though I knew the four-part, almost anthology nature of the film going in. Its genius lies in how it accesses emotions and allegiances through withholding, never making the full design apparent but finding beauty in the pieces.

I had also totally forgotten how, at least for the majority of the film, Oki isn’t the main character, and indeed doesn’t even appear in the first part, A Day for Incantation. (I should note here that Wikipedia’s plot synopsis assumes that this is the only part that takes place in the present, with at least part of the film a flashback; I disagree.) Instead, Jin-gu is — aside from a few cutaways to Oki’s/Og-hui’s experiences during the second part, King of Kisses — the main character of the first two parts, which constitutes the first 55 minutes of this 80 minute film — the first Hong that can truly be said to be shorter than an ordinary feature — and are both considerably than the last two parts. The third part, After the Snowstorm, Song’s perspective, takes up just less than ten minutes, while the last part, Oki’s Movie — not the last time the actual title of a Hong film will appear onscreen late into the film — runs about fifteen minutes.

Without this foreknowledge, one might easily anticipate something edging closer to early Hong, albeit in a more overtly reflective context: Jin-gu’s insecurities about his position as a professor are reminiscent of The Power of Kangwon Province — there’s even another bottle of Blue Label, though this one is actually drunk onscreen — but there’s just as much emphasis placed on the nature of art itself and how it ties into forces both economic and personal: the odd relationship he has with his wife and the total mystery of Yeong-su, notably she repeats the admonishment to not make promises that he couldn’t keep from Like You Know It All; Song’s bitter statement that “film as an art is dead” worldwide and that “only books will save us” dovetails into Jin-gu’s insistence to his berated student — the use of voiceover for her script is oddly lovely, the only voice that’s not one of the main characters — that he’s trying to teach her how to survive; the outrage that Jin-gu experiences when Seo Young-hwa takes his picture almost suggests something of the old superstition that photography would take someone’s soul; and of course the Q&A scene. It at least initially begins with a genuinely (if alcohol-fueled) insightful preference to focus on pure reaction as a viewer of films, saying that the impulse to focus on themes is taught and puts all the interesting themes about films is something of a funnel; like the classroom scene in Like You Know It All, I have little doubt that Hong believes much of this.

The rest of the Q&A scene, however, is as mortifyingly hilarious as anything Hong’s done, the ultimate “comment not a question” that’s probably ever been conceived of. Even though it only lasts for about three minutes, it seems to stretch out longer, and it’s crucial that, even though the woman keeps prodding him, Jin-gu is the only one onscreen once the initial accusation is made. Since this is a Hongian man, it’s almost certain that such an interaction did take place, but it’s so agonizing that it’s no wonder that Hong moves on immediately after; the moderator intervenes a few minutes too late.

King of Kisses, then, virtually plays as a mirror of the first half of Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, a slow-building seduction, though the sight of Jin-gu huddled on the stairs outside on Christmas Eve, with Oki emerging in a Tweety blanket, is priceless (as is the repeated use of “Pomp and Circumstance” throughout Oki’s Movie, a film about university where no one graduates). But here, too, much more emphasis is placed on little parts that would be almost extraneous to an earlier Hong film: the mystery of Oki’s friend who dropped out, why Oki couldn’t finish her film, Song recanting his praise of Jin-gu’s film. Indeed, the inference is that the first part was, effectively, Jin-gu’s short that he had shown the professor. There’s almost the temptation to treat Oki’s Movie like Hollis Frampton’s “(nostalgia),” where his short in the first part is left off-screen and each subsequent part playing as a response to the one that came before it. Alternatively, the short could be Oki’s Movie, thus making the film an odd Möbius strip (though that seems unlikely), or even “Lost in the Mountains,” which itself is a mirror of the Jung-Moon-Lee triangle — Kim Jin-kyung, the fourth point on the rectangle from “Lost in the Mountains,” once again plays Jung’s friend, though she’s outside of the entangled relationships here — though it being described as a reflection of Jin-gu’s perspective makes this unlikely. The milk carton is in some ways a useful encapsulation of the film: why is this part here, and how can something so small change the entire universe?

That same question could be applied to the third part, which is in some ways an even more radical shift than its predecessor. While Song has technically appeared in more of the film than Oki, he was always clearly situated as a secondary character, someone to be looked up to. This reframing is partially helped by seeing him in a classroom that looks more akin to one for grade school than film school; for the first half, he is left adrift without his students, eating a sandwich and using the restroom. The reappearance of the professor who left the school while castigating Song in the first part is another surprise, as does Song’s apparent subordinate position to him; whether this is how Song sees himself, or a greater understanding of the situation that Jin-gu doesn’t have access to, is left unanswered. Once Oki and Jin-gu arrive, the dynamic totally shifts, and the impromptu Q&A session reminded me of, of all things, Jean-Pierre Melville’s scene in Breathless, these short, almost koan answers to questions; Oki’s question about whether they’re human beings or animals calls back to both Hahaha and On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate. The sight of Song vomiting up an entire octopus, along with the zoom-in on it, is both gross and somewhat liberating; the text messages that the two students are genuinely sweet, while also hinting at Oki’s possible affair with him.

The sense of liberation that Song possesses upon quitting teaching is immediately refracted in Oki’s Movie. Her use of constant reflective voiceover, constantly highlighting the similarities and differences between the two days, two years and a day apart — weirdly similar to the Before Trilogy — reminded me of both Varda and, of all people, James N. Kienitz Wilkins in its interrogation of what these images mean. Like Hong’s films to come, two similar events are placed side by side, the disjunctions helping us in some ways to reckon with our recollections. The tone is truly serene, only really interrupted by the argument Oki and Song have — as an ironic side note, despite the frequent mention of Jin-gu’s heavy drinking that’s even demanded to be cut down by his wife, this is the first Hong without soju in it. Maybe most striking of all is the relative talkativeness of the first day, the feeling of connection that was severed at an unknown time in the intervening years; it’s so touching to hear how Oki enjoyed being held and the genuine joy on the three characters’ faces, even as the viewer knows that it’s all in the past. The third-to-last shot is maybe my favorite in Hong so far: it initially begins as the long-awaited accompaniment to the shot of Oki waiting for Song outside the restroom; then it pans over to Song in the distance, clad in a long overcoat and wearing an enigmatic yet understanding smile as he walks off; then moves back to a stricken Oki. The simple choreography of that shot that nevertheless connects back to so much is basically breathtaking.

The closing voiceover, which nominally is Oki’s reflection that this means of reflecting her guilt and exhilaration on the occasion of remembering the two days, then brings the meta-nature of Oki’s Movie into full tilt. The viewer is led to question whether we have actually seen Oki at all, and whether this entire film is a project undertaken by three or four directors who use and reuse actors in the same or similar roles. Certainly, the use of opening credits for each segment — amusingly laid out like a slide projector — would support this. The voiceover does sound like Jung to me, though of course Oki could have had her actress voice her. Said questions are left blessedly unanswered, and the viewer is thus put into the drifting mindspace of Oki herself, having gotten to reflect on some things while pondering the essential questions in life: why is this thing in the universe? how do you control your sex life? why do you love someone? Song answers that for everything important in life, he doesn’t know the reason for it; Hong recognizes the ultimate limits, but by placing all these fragments together Oki’s Movie brings us closer to understanding.