English Title: Night and Day
Korean Title: 밤과 낮/Bam-goa Nat
Premiere Date: February 12, 2008
U.S. Release Year: 2009
Festival: Berlin
Film Number: 8
First Viewing Number: 23
First Viewing Date: October 13, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 3
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 8
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 26
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 3
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 144 minutes (1st longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear with date title cards, some time jumps
Recurring Actors: Kim Yeong-ho (first appearance), Lee Sun-kyun (first appearance), Gi Ju-bong (first appearance)
Season: Summer (August 8) – Fall (October 12)
Weather: Sunny, cloudy, rain
Alcohol: Red wine, soju, white wine, Heineken beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, tea, water, Coca-Cola, orange juice
Food: Oysters, kimchi soup, charcuterie, bread, seafood tofu soup, kimchi pancake, sandwich, dakjuk, banchan, chips, croissants, gum, pear
Drinking Scenes: 4
Creative People: Painters, film set workers
Academia: Painting students
Vacation: 2
Dream Sequences: 2
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 5
Family: Husband-wife
Vehicle Scenes: 1
Crying Scenes: 5
Number of Shots: 135
Number of Zooms: 29 out, 42 in
Music Style: Symphony No. 7 (Beethoven)
Title Background: Gray burlap
Voiceover: Yes

Night and Day, the first Hong I consider to be a bona fide masterpiece (admittedly a traditional Sallittist opinion), acts as both a synthesis of and a decided break with what came before it, a milestone that he hasn’t really tried to match. The most obvious difference is its length, Hong’s only film to come within striking distance of two and a half hours. But in many ways, at least for me, it’s possibly the lightest film he’s made yet in terms of its progression; this can definitely be attributed to the Rohmerian structure (more on that later), which cuts up the film so as to interrupt cause-and-effect, letting the viewer absorb the feeling of perhaps his ultimate hang-out film. At the same time, there’s just something so pleasing about this. I didn’t necessarily remember this as his funniest film, but it’s definitely a top contender; while it still has its fair share of harrowing moments, this is just chock-full of priceless moments, stemming from the premise and setting itself.

Night and Day also marks two enormous steps forward towards the Hong identity most commonly known until recently — along with a return from his 2007 year off, the last year that Hong didn’t premiere a feature in for more than a decade. As a side note, I had been thinking of Hong in a strictly early and late period (or first and second half) manner, but Sean Gilman recently brought up to me the idea that his current career can be divided into three parts: The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well to Woman on the Beach, Night and Day to Hill of Freedom, and Right Now, Wrong Then to the present, with porous boundaries in between.

In this respect, there’s few switches that Hong’s ever had as decisive as his first use of digital to shoot Night and Day, never returning to film again. Truthfully, there doesn’t seem to have been a substantial shift in filming technique; there are no extended takes that film wouldn’t have been executable on a reel, and the approach to panning and zooming has stayed fairly consistent, though he appears to use auto-focus throughout. But part of me wonders whether the longer runtime is in fact a byproduct of the freedom to shoot more scenes, not worrying about wasting film. As far as I can tell, Hong isn’t “improvising” the structure of his films at this point, but it’s certainly possible that Hong planned to have more sequences for this very reason.

The other development is, of course, the use of France, specifically Paris and Deauville. While Night and Day didn’t kick off a sudden wave of Hong films made overseas — I wait with bated breath for the film set in America that he’s been considering for years — the ability to transmute his sensibility to a different locale entirely seems to open up his cinema, allowing him to evoke the great pleasure of watching people exist in a city. He’s certainly helped by the pointed focus on Koreans. It is really fun watching all the random passers-by, but there’s only a few snatches of French (and English), and besides a few merchants the only French people with substantial screen time are the film set workers — this is the first, and as far as I can remember one of the only times he’s actually shown a film set, despite the frequent use of filmmakers as subjects — and the man at the airport. That opening scene is one of Hong’s funniest ever, predicated on the snail’s pace attempts to communicate, and of course punctuated by the man’s exhortation to “be careful,” which likely was meant to relate to personal safety but which, because this is both a Hong film and a film set in France, resonates across an entire spectrum of morality. I’m also not certain whether this was part of the Musée d’Orsay/Louvre film contest that produced Flight of the Red Balloon, Summer Hours, *and* Face; the Orsay scene is incredibly memorable for its depiction of L’Origine du Monde (whose title Seong-nam rejects despite appreciating the artwork), but besides a shot from outside later on the link seems too tangential for it to have been part of that series.

When I first watched Night and Day, I marveled at how this was basically a distillation of all six of Rohmer’s Moral Tales and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore to boot. I still stand by that statement, but since then, I’ve come to embrace the view that Rivette is secretly the greater influence on Hong than Rohmer, and that comes to the fore here. Especially early on, the use of the dates is used for both comedy and playful mystery of purpose, depicting a day with a single mundane action, and skipping ahead a few days or even weeks without any seeming explanation. The days aren’t necessarily free-floating, but the way this dips in and out of scenes recalls nothing less than Out 1 in its exuberant structure.

Still, to return to the other two French influences, they do resonate rather resoundingly throughout Night and Day, both structurally and narratively. While the Moral Tales are the most common Rohmer to cite (and my own most immediate frame of reference, having not watched any of the season films and only some of the Comedies and Proverbs), their stated intent — to depict a man who is tempted by a woman but decides to return to the one he is committed to — do map rather neatly onto the overall narrative arc of the film, especially resembling Love in the Afternoon in its depiction of marriage, though of course Seong-nam goes further than Frédéric does. Likewise, the use of the days recalls (at least for me) The Green Ray, which Hong put on his Sight & Sound list; while that film used it to go beyond a supposedly meaningful date, opening up Delphine’s odyssey to further possibilities, this uses it to stress the absurd amount of time that Seong-nam spends in Paris; the handover between seasons is also handled very well, getting across the relatively epic nature of this film for Hong.

And, while this is more tenuous, there’s something in Night and Day‘s triangulation of the three women in Paris that lies very close to Eustache: Hyeon-joo is Marie, the woman who wants Seong-nam but can’t have him; Yoo-jeong is Veronika, the tempestuous woman who Seong-nam wants but who initially resists him; Min-seon is Gilberte, the ex-lover, though she pursues Seong-nam instead of the other way around. There’s a country mile’s worth less of acidity (even less than I remembered), but the blending of this into the overall Moral Tale narrative lends a great edge and ambiguity: the amazing final dream could be just an absurd subconscious figment, or it could be an actual desire or even a premonition of future divorce to come.

Still, Night and Day is definably Hong’s own from moment one — no attempt to show unmediated reality like Eustache — but there’s so much here that I don’t recall him repeating. For one, there are the opening title cards, which are hilariously specific in noting that it’s the summer of 2007, that he was with American exchange students, that it was his first time smoking marijuana, and that he was notified by his friend Mr. Baek (who is never shown on camera). Especially backed by Beethoven, the farcical profundity is very much the point, assigning a supposed great importance to an event that, despite the strictness of South Korea’s anti-drug laws, isn’t serious at all.

While Night and Day‘s title could be a reference to anything from Cole Porter to Lang to Akerman, I choose to point to Mr. Jang’s early assertion that the sun sets very late in Parisian summers (especially compared to South Korean) and how it can be difficult to differentiate night from day. Indeed, the only scenes I remember being set in darkness in the entire film are the phone calls that Seong-nam makes to his wife at 11 PM, and those take place inside. This also might have something to do with the seemingly total preoccupation that Seong-nam has with clouds and painting them to little monetary success; it makes me wonder whether Hong has seen James Benning’s Ten Skies.

The actors that are featured here forms a truly fascinating picture. Though Kim Young-ho makes a few more appearances, he’s never led a Hong film since, which is kind of baffling because of how totally he nails the self-absorption of a Hongian male while still allowing for a great range of reactions. Likewise, none of the women make another appearance; Park Eun-hye is especially odd because of how well she brings out the coyness and unpredictability that helps unify some of the more disparate threads. On the flip side, both Gi Ju-bong and Lee Sun-kyun make their first of many Hong appearances here in smaller roles; they both ace it but it’s weird seeing them knowing the essential performances they’ll be giving in a few years.

Hong really does have a great feeling for Paris here in quotidian terms, avoiding any especially discernible landmarks (at least for me who’s only been once) and maintaining an openness that allows for the inclusion of such inscrutably sublime moments as the worker who’s sweeping the water and dog feces down the street; the hairtie that Seong-nam spots that seems to match the one Yoo-jeong wears; or the film set, with Seong-nam miraculously breaking the fall of the little bird that is nursed back to health by the PAs and who appears to show up in the airport. While the differences are emphasized by Seong-nam — lack of humidity, the perceived phoniness of the Koreans, the supposed innocence of the French — and much of the comedy comes from his feelings of dislocation and its ability to create so many more moments of discomfort due to culture shock, Hong resists the urge to make it much more or less than a city, which is a mindset where the particulars can truly arise organically.

The brief invocations of religion that Seong-nam deploys based solely off of a serendipitous encounter with a Bible in the cramped guest house are incredibly funny, especially his scene with a towel-clad Min-seon where he reads Matthew 5:29-30 (in reverse order). They represent some of the most extreme self-justifications that a Hong character has used yet, though their intent is for the opposite purpose than the typical attempts at seduction. It’s more ambiguous whether he actually prays in the church while he’s waiting for Yoo-jeong; it could easily be him pretending that he wasn’t taking a nap as he did before.

The arm wrestling is as pure a metaphor for masculinity that Hong has deployed, a sort of surprising vigor that hints at Seong-nam’s hidden depth and strength of character. I also forgot that Lee Sun-kyun’s character is from North Korea; coupled with Seong-nam’s note in the voiceover — which feels closer to how Hong uses voiceover going forward, offering more abstract representations of his character’s thought than mere narrative, a change also applied to the use of music here — that a summit is being held between the two countries, I don’t know if Hong is necessarily trying to make a political point. In a certain sense, it makes more legible the relationship between countries; while Seong-nam can only interact with French people by envying their families, houses, and cars, there are still men on the other side of the DMZ whose egos (and bodies) can be bruised just as easily as his countrymen.

The use of women in Night and Day, aside from the constellation of Korean ex-pats that occasionally rises suddenly, continues the steps taken in Woman on the Beach, at least for Yoo-jeong and Seong-in. The former, after initially being introduced by other’s perceptions of her and in a dream sequence that recalls Claire’s Knee in an eroticization of a body part — between this and the first sex scene in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, does Hong have a foot fetish? — gains her dimensionality from the time spent with her, especially in the scene where he keeps goading her to slap him in masochistic atonement. Her continued concealment of her plagiarism works hand-in-hand with Seong-nam’s own secrets (especially in lying about the reason for his departure), and his decision to keep seeing her without any questions is a perfect tacit blindness to anything except l’amour fou.

Seong-in’s presence already feels established even before her first on-screen appearance; the phone calls feel as vital to Night and Day as anything else, equalling the more visible intimacy in how unguarded they can feel; the moment when she’s asked to masturbate (with a perfect cut-off to the scene) is stretched out the right amount. When she does appear in person, the ease of acceptance of her ruse helps show at least some of Seong-nam’s moral growth, while showing how a woman can now be just as crafty as a man. While Min-seon’s suicide and Hyeon-joo’s gradual disappearance don’t let them have the same impact, the former feels as much of a moral turning point as possible without sensationalizing her death, and the latter still has some wonderful moments, especially in how she echoes the complaint that Yoo-jeong is realistic and stingy (creating a hilarious scenario where Seong-nam is quite literally caught in between the two) and in her delightful scene speaking French with and providing food to the unhoused man.

The closing dream sequence really is a marvel, especially in how it uses none of the main women from before but instead Ji-hye, the student who Yoo-jeong plagiarized from. The leap forward in time is initially obscured by Seong-nam donning a collared shirt and Ji-hye introduced sitting with her back to the camera. The pig ramming into the bathhouse window as Ji-hye cries — I was wrong about there being no subsequent nudity in Hong films, though it’s of women in the background in a non-sexual context — is a perfect juxtaposition of surreal tones, and just as the film threatens to move back into early Hong territory the balance is restored. That this is the first Hong film that ends with the main couple together since Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors with little of the sordidness of that film makes this basically a happy ending. Here, even with the complications, there is something so oddly lovely about Seong-nam’s relative maturation, how his time away and experience with precarity has led him to reconsider priorities. The self-importance and willingness to lie and ultimately abandon Yoo-jeong (with her acceptance) to the possibility of pregnancy are still there, but there’s a kindness as well that truly lifts this Hong heads and shoulders above its predecessors.

English Title: Woman on the Beach
Korean Title: 해변의 여인/Haebyeoneui yeoin
Premiere Date: August 31, 2006
U.S. Release Year: 2008
Festival: Toronto, New York
Film Number: 7
First Viewing Number: 22
First Viewing Date: August 26, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 14
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 7
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 25
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 14
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 127 minutes (2nd longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Three linear unlabeled parts each separated by two days, moderate repetition in first two
Recurring Actors: Kim Tae-woo (second appearance), Moon Sung-keun (second appearance), Lee Ki-woo (second appearance), Song Seon-mi (first appearance), Go Hyun-jung (first appearance)
Season: Spring
Weather: Sunny, windy
Alcohol: Soju, Cass beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Tea, coffee, Coca-Cola
Food: Sushi, sweet potato, peanuts, pineapple, fried fish, bean soup, fried eggs, rice, tteokbokki, gum
Drinking Scenes: 8
Creative People: Film director/writer, musician
Academia: N/A
Vacation: Yes (two)
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Daughter-father (off-screen)
Vehicle Scenes: 4
Crying Scenes: 3
Number of Shots: 102
Number of Zooms: 15 out, 39 in
Music Style: Sprightly piano and strings, winds and xylophone, somber piano, strings bells, piano and guitar
Title Background: Gray fabric
Voiceover: N/A

Woman on the Beach is something of a transitional film for Hong, if not quite as strong a break as On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate or Tale of Cinema was with its evolutions. For one, this is the first film of his without nudity or on-screen sex, which I believe has held for the rest of his career; this makes a bigger difference than one might think, as that graphic, often mortifying release often took something away from the moments of intimacy. This also might be the first film produced (co-produced in this case) by his production company Jeonwonsa, though a Korean website says that Tale of Cinema was the first. And most crucially, this is arguably the first Hong where a woman’s perspective forms the majority of the runtime, depending on how one views the character dynamics throughout the film.

For my own part, Woman on the Beach seems to function in three parts, though this is somewhat hampered by the lack of the hilariously blunt, Rohmeresque “two days later” title card that precedes Jung-rae and Mun-suk’s second visit to Shindori Beach. Jung-rae is clearly the main character during his dalliance with Sun-hee — it’s a surprise that Kim Seung-woo hasn’t been in another Hong, given how well he nails the writer-director self-absorption that comes to dominate his scenes — but the rest of the film is more free-floating in its perspective.

This ambiguity stems equally from the greater prominence both Mun-suk and Sun-hee are given — the drinking scene that they have alone together is genuinely a breath of fresh air given the films that have come before — and from, it must be said, the title, which may be a Renoir reference though I’m not sure. Initially, it might seem like Mun-suk is another projection, something which is heightened by the vague resemblance Sun-hee has to her and Jung-rae’s infatuation. But little moments of performance from the very beginning, coupled with Chang-wook’s virtual disappearance from the film — amusingly, Kim Tae-woo plays more or less the same role as he did in Woman Is the Future of Man, albeit on a drastically accelerated timescale — set the stage for both her solo drinking scene and the final third.

This is also the first Hong film constructed explicitly along triangles, which almost beg to be analogized. Jung-rae-Mun-suk-Chang-wook has its Hongian repetition in Jung-rae-Sun-hee-Sun-hee’s friend, but it’s murkier between Jung-rae, Mun-suk, and Sun-hee, especially in deciding who departs in the best condition. Likewise, it’s tempting if almost cruel to see Chang-wook and Sun-hee’s friend as the dog Dori, who gets abandoned, though he gets to grow up in a better place/environment, which may well be the case for them as well once extricated from this romantic entanglement.

The triangles themselves get their perfect mirror in the diagram that Jung-rae draws for Mun-suk, one of the greatest and funniest scenes that Hong’s ever done. It oddly comes very close to the drawing that Hong once did for an interview with Sabzian, but where he found “infinite worlds possible,” Jung-rae finds the impossibility of perceiving reality. Obviously, this entire scene is meant as something of parody, in both his convoluted explanations to wave away the true accusations of infidelity and in Mun-suk’s awed reaction, as is also the case with his vaguely Hongian script idea for About Miracles. Indeed, Mun-suk’s observation that Jung-rae’s abrasiveness is “nothing like his films,” in addition to inverting the line from Tale of Cinema, certainly strikes the viewer even without a sense of what his produced films are like. But I still feel like there’s a great deal to be mined from their absurdities, a conflation of the search for connections with the self-absorption of men; that it’s counterbalanced by a growing drive for Hong to evoke his female characters’ inner lives forms much of the engine.

That engine, for better and worse, sometimes gives way to more languid moments; this is Hong’s most dedicated vacation film yet — The Power of Kangwon Province contains numerous stretches in Seoul, and On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate is at least half the journey home — and really also his most structurally/narratively simple — though Jung-rae says he is going to finish his script, that aspect is covered in a laughably short amount of screentime and two handwritten pages. That quality appeals to me especially in the little moments where it does diverge from conversation: the moment where Jung-rae comes across and bows to the three bare trees is echoed in On the Beach at Night Alone and In Another Country, if I’m not mistaken. And the cruel joke Mun-suk plays on Chang-wook by leading him away from them on the beach is hilarious.

The first mention of a character living in Germany, which appears to be an odd obsession of Hong’s even though he hadn’t been featured in Berlin at this moment, comes here as well courtesy of Mun-suk. Hong’s cinema has to this point been very contained to South Korea, but beginning here there’s something of a more cosmopolitan edge that comes to an early head with this film’s follow-up. The distinctly xenophobic views of Jung-rae are certainly extreme, but they plug into the Korean values that are discussed throughout; both Mun-suk and Sun-hee are described as tall, an appellation which feels like a backhanded compliment in context.

While this is Hong’s second longest film to date, this alternates between slackness and a certain tightness, especially when it comes to some of the still-settling editing patterns and the music (which retains the past two films’ variety of cues and use over a few scenes of dialogue). In the first dialogue sequence, there’s essentially a reverse-cut to Chang-wook during Jung-rae’s first conversation, and an insert shot of the cherry blossoms that Mun-suk is admiring before the full long shot. It’s also interesting that there are so many more zoom-ins than zoom-outs here, presumably partially a result of often opening on long landscape shots before zooming-in to the characters, though the static extended shots of nighttime seduction on the beach are marvelous.

While there are only two scenes inside cars, I decided to add on two more scenes to my tally because they have such a strange quality, and demonstrate well both the strengths and minor weaknesses of Woman on the Beach. The first is the motorcycle harassment by the disgruntled waiter, which Sun-hee impressively staves off. On the one hand, it demonstrates what’s a rare and slightly ill-fitting decision to more conventionally resolve the conflicts here; in the span of a single shot Mun-suk has a slight resolution of her relationship with Jung-rae and patches things up with Sun-hee. Though the latter moment is lovely, it feels a little too neat for Hong, especially considering the films preceding and following this. On the other, it helps reveal and complicate more of Sun-hee’s personality, first hinted at in her assertion that she’s as honest as she allows herself to be, a cagy revelation that feels apropos to many of Hong’s female protagonists going forward.

The other is the final scene of Mun-suk’s drive onto the beach, where she gets stuck and is helped out by two men whose own car is mired in the sand. For one, it introduces a unique, almost Bazinian spectacle of watching people actually struggling and succeeding to extricate a car that Hong seldom delves to. For the other, its placement at the end appears to analogize the film in miniature: Mun-suk gets herself trapped in this tricky situation and is extricated by the action of men. But whether it’s true freedom or not is left unresolved; she merely drives down the beach. Whether she gets stuck again while trying to cross the border to get free is left open; what matters is her enjoyment in the moment.

English Title: Tale of Cinema
Korean Title: 극장전/Geukjangjeon/Theater Exhibition
Premiere Date: May 19, 2005
U.S. Release Year: 2021
Festival: Cannes
Film Number: 6
First Viewing Number: 21
First Viewing Date: August 6, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 9
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 6
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 24
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 9
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 89 minutes (15th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Two unlabeled parts, film-within-film then reality with large repetition
Recurring Actors: Kim Sang-kyung (second appearance), Park Min-yeong (second appearance), Kim Myeong-su (first appearance), Uhm Ji-won (first appearance), Lee Ki-woo (first appearance)
Season: Winter
Weather: Cloudy, sunny, snowy
Alcohol: Soju, Cass and Hite beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Water, tea
Food: Gukbap, Korean barbecue, sushi
Drinking Scenes: 3
Creative People: Directors, actress
Academia: Film school graduates
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: 1
Film Screening: 1 (outside of theater)
Films Within Films: 1
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 0
Family: Son-mother, brother-brother
Vehicle Scenes: 3
Crying Scenes: 4
Number of Shots: 82
Number of Zooms: 30 out, 43 in
Music Style: Pensive synth piano and strings; also upbeat xylophone with organ and bells; violins; synthesizers
Title Background: First shot
Voiceover: Throughout first half and at end

More than any other film, Tale of Cinema — one of my favorite early Hongs — is where it feels like Hong finally caught up to the retroactive stereotype of his work. While past films have featured actors and directors, their work was never strictly the center of their relationships; though we don’t get any film festival Q&As, hearing characters finally actually discuss a retrospective and their films is almost startling. This is also the first time that Hong broke from his two-year release pattern, inaugurating a level of productivity almost unheard of in 21st century filmmaking; the first Hong to contain a definitive film-within-the-film; the first Hong with voiceover; and maybe most notably of all, the first Hong to use zooms.

And use them he does: there’s almost as many zooms in the film as there are shots, though it should be noted that this has a marked increase in number of shots from Woman Is the Future of Man after a steady declining trend. This begins in the opening shot, the first appearance of his regular habit of zooming out from a distant landmark to reveal a street, then zooming in to the protagonist, Sang-won in this half of the film; or, slightly less than half; as Young-shil mentions later, it is a short film, and we literally see barely over 39 minutes in the actual film.

Hong uses zooms in an almost liberated manner, consciously playing around with what he can do, in the process discovering certain hallmarks: beginning on a plate of food or sleeping pills before zooming out; zooming in, panning, then zooming out during a tense discussion. There’s one gleefully unorthodox moment in particular when Dong-soo is leaving the hotel and the camera zooms out from the stairs, pans and zooms into a woman wearing a similar shade as Young-shil, then quickly zooms out again as Dong-soo walks into the background. I also totally forgot about the dream sequence with the White woman who speaks perfect Korean and offers Sang-won an apple, one of the most delirious Hong dreams.

I loved the film even more this time — in the past it was the only Hong pre-2008 that I loved on the level of his second-tier work — but I can definitely see how the insistence on the conceit, the highlighting of the parallels between fiction and reality might be a little too on-the-nose; in its own way it’s making a statement as open as Goodbye, Dragon Inn two years earlier. But I had completely forgotten how this swings in a wider emotional arc than any Hong before. It certainly helps that this brings the Hongian crying scene, typically a wail of anguish not far removed from the drunken shouting that appeared plenty before, into greater prominence. But the nature of both parts, involving attempted double suicide in the first part and an unspecified grievous illness in the latter, casts something of a pall over many of the proceedings.

Of course, there’s something deeply absurd, if also sobering, about Dong-soo’s revelation that the film was based on his own personal experience even as he falls into the same cycle, and how he walks conspicuously behind Young-shil during many moments in the second half. In a sense, Kim Sang-kyung has distinguished himself from the other past Hong protagonists in his relative sense of purpose; in the second half of both films he’s starred in, he pursues a woman with renewed resolve, in a manner reflective of the first. But, like On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, the first and second halves don’t fit together: the first half almost represents an idealization, replete with numerous varieties of music cues (if still more restrained/less on-the-nose than most of Woman Is the Future of Man‘s) and a neat family dynamic. While Hong doesn’t abandon his embedded style by any means, it is still as if he streamlined his progression to a point not seen in his films at large until later, compressing the action so as to let the second half unravel the taut narrative. The greater of number of shots does help, but a few editing choices in the second half feel atypical: two cuts within the same scene that advance the time forward a little bit, and an extraordinary match cut of Dong-soo smoking in front of the restaurant to him smoking in front of the hospital.

I’m also reminded in the last part of what Hamaguchi said about the coda of Drive My Car, choosing to make it “imperfect.” Young-shil’s “you didn’t understand the film” kiss-off — which blessedly remains unexplained, free for interpretation — is as choice a line as Hong’s ever had, but his actual place of ending is much more knotty. First, there is an unresolved conclusion with Young-shil like the kind Hong was fond of in his early period; then there is a shockingly anguished scene with Sang-won; then, to close, the first instance of voiceover in the second half, which was so prevalent and even ran over scenes in the first half. While the first half’s use could be attributed to that difference in style between Hong and Sang-won’s sensibilities, the second reaches back into the fictive, to show the remaining union of mindset between Dong-soo and his fictional portrayal. Dong-soo’s quotation that he’s “too fond of drinking” and that “life is too tough” reverberates across both parts, if not Hong in general.

The presentation of the play-within-the-film, which preserves the proscenium and has the amusingly direct title of “The Mother” — we never get a title for Dong-soo’s short — of course links up with the mother-son dynamic that bleeds through his anguish. But it also points to both the return to young adult protagonists, previously only seen in the first half of The Power of Kangwon Province, and the stomach pains and vomiting that recur.

Going back to understanding the film, and with the knowledge that others — including Dennis Lim, whose monograph I’m looking forward to even more than before — may view it differently, I see Young-shil as acting as an even more overt reflection of whatever each man wants to see her as, which of course dovetails with her acting. This is far from the only Hong to make this idea its subject, but it has an even greater charge here, in large part because there’s so much performance coursing throughout this; the two karaoke performances of each song, the really strong work put into deaging(?) the actors — this is the first Hong where all lead actors return at least once — and most tantalizing the possibility that Young-shil’s counterpart didn’t want to die by suicide at all. Instead of confronting the fact that the actress persona and the ex-girlfriend role both don’t map onto Young-shil’s actual being, Sang-won gets trapped in cycles of illness, and Dong-soo retreats into looking at his habits again: he merely thinks about maybe stopping those Marlboro reds which he sees as a mirror instead of a coincidence, that fate that draws Hong’s interest more and more.

English Title: Woman Is the Future of Man
Korean Title: 여자는 남자의 미래다/Yeojaneun namjaui miraeda
Premiere Date: May 14, 2004
U.S. Release Year: 2006
Festival: Cannes
Film Number: 5
First Viewing Number: 11
First Viewing Date: November 3, 2017
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 27
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 5
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 12
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 25
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 88 minutes (18th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Linear with two flashbacks, light doubling in last third
Recurring Actors: Kim Tae-woo (first appearance), Park Min-yeong (first appearance)
Season: Winter (December), also Autumn
Weather: Snow, also sunny
Alcohol: Soju, baijiu, beer, OB beer, dongdongju, J&B scotch
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Tea, mango juice, water, Coca-Cola, carrot juice, coffee
Food: Coconut shrimp, chili pepper noodles, fried chicken, squid, tuna kimchi stew, kimchi, candy, Pringles, fruit
Drinking Scenes: 5
Creative People: Film director/writer, painters
Academia: Film teacher/student, Western art professor, art students
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: 1
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 1
Family: Son-father
Vehicle Scenes: 1
Crying Scenes: 2
Number of Shots: 50
Number of Zooms: 0
Music Style: Synth light piano, light guitar and recorder, tuba and piano
Title Background: Burlap
Voiceover: N/A

If there was a Hong that I dreaded returning to in this project, it was probably Woman Is the Future of Man, which I remembered being the nastiest and bleakest of his films, even in the early period, and my least favorite of the films in the style that’s already become fairly entrenched. I feel like I might have been too hard on it in my mind, though on the whole my opinion hasn’t changed — which says much more about my love for Hong’s work generally than this film itself. It’s also fascinating because of the quietly significant place it holds in his work: his first with foreign funding courtesy of mk2 films; his first film in Cannes Competition, where like every subsequent appearance it received no jury prize whatsoever; and most importantly his first film under 90 minutes, rather than merely two hours. It also tends to be divisive; I belong to the camp that deems it decidedly lesser Hong, but it seems to crop up often as a favorite, I distinctly remember Isabelle Huppert really loves it.

I actually found myself liking what appears to be the central storyline a lot more this time, and in particular the destabilizing unmarked flashbacks triggered by a Proustian madeleine of a woman with a purple scarf, who doesn’t appear to come back later in the film, but instead remains a symbol of attraction, which characterizes Seon-hwa’s role in the film to a certain extent. (Note: this is the first of perhaps a few Hongs with a title inspired by a poem, here by Louis Aragon.) While the off-screen rape (something that Hong introduces at least one more time) still intrudes on the worlds of his films a bit much for my taste, the obsessive cleaning and the idea of sex as cleansing hit the right note of self-absorption, and it’s amusingly odd to see Hong filming a bustling airport and a wedding, even outside the church. It’s also fascinating to see a relatively compact film, charting two days of drinking, incorporate two separate seasons with chronological jumps within each flashback.

Where the film runs into some atypical trouble, aside from the more confrontational nature of the interactions that hearkens back more to Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors than anything else, is in the final third. The slow transition of “main” protagonist from Hyeon-gon — a regular early Hong lead in his first appearance — to Mun-ho — who doesn’t appear again in Hong but was a regular for Park Chan-wook and played the main villain in Oldboy in the same Cannes Competition — isn’t necessarily the problem, even though it happens by Seon-hwa swapping sexual partners, but introducing the professor-student dynamic throws things off balance. It’s interesting to think of Kyung-hee and Min-soo as analogues for Seon-hwa and Kyung-hee, respectively, and the doubling with a more active rival male is neatly highlighted by the second blowjob, but it feels a bit rushed, shunted into the last thirty minutes and interfering with the contained nature of what came beforehand.

This is the first of numerous appearances of a Chinese restaurant in Hong’s films, a recurring interest that fascinates me, as does the first appearance here of a fried chicken bar. I believe they’re drinking baijiu but I could be mistaken, and it also features some dialogue between the owner and the waitress of Mandarin, spoken quietly but which sounds all correct to me. Also of note: a mention of Kangwon Province.

This might actually be the Hong that uses the most music, with at least three separate tracks which provide not the punctuation that normally characterizes his films, but instead a transitional nature that almost seems to reflect the emotions of each scene in a much more conventional manner than usual. There’s also a nice restive quality to some moments, especially the one where Hyeong-gon and the neighbor dance behind the balcony door to music that sounds like something out of Julee Cruise and the man selling rice cakes in the distance.

Hong might be an underrated director of animals: everything with Mary is a highlight, and the timing of her movements during the first blowjob, following her as she is shut out of the bedroom and then bursting into Hyeong-gon’s bedroom is terrific. And Mun-ho’s assertion that Koreans are “too fond of sex” and have “no real culture” is exactly as hypocritical and cutting as it needs to be.

English Title: On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate
Korean Title: 생활의 발견/Saenghwalui balgyeon/Discovery of Life
Premiere Date: March 22, 2002
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: New York
Film Number: 4
First Viewing Number: 5
First Viewing Date: March 3, 2017
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 15
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 4
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 5
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 16
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 115 minutes (6th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Seven linear chapters, slight repetition
Recurring Actors: Kim Sang-kyung (first appearance), Ye Ji-won (first appearance), Kim Beom-chun (first appearance)
Season: Summer (August)
Weather: Rain, sunny
Alcohol: Soju, OB lager beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Water, coffee, Pocari Sweat
Food: Chicken gruel, Korean barbecue, mak-guksu(?), sundubu-jigae
Drinking Scenes: 5
Creative People: Actor, dancer, writer, director
Academia: Professor
Vacation: Yes
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 1
Family: N/A
Vehicle Scenes: 6
Crying Scenes: 1
Number of Shots: 108
Number of Zooms: 0
Music Style: Spiegel im Spiegel (Arvo Pärt)
Title Background: Green background
Voiceover: N/A

This was the first early Hong I saw — I’ll be running into the odd paradox of that classification throughout this, but let’s place the dividing line between 2013 and 2014 for now — in large part because I got the sense that it was the consensus favorite of the period, and in some ways his international breakthrough, being his first film to screen in the NYFF Main Slate. I’m not so sure about that now — partly because of the vagueness of the period, partly because I feel like early Hong has been somewhat overlooked by many who’ve come to him in recent years, so interest only spikes for a new restoration or Blu-ray — but On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate stuck in my mind as one of the standouts, and it’s only grown for me on this rewatch, in part because it seems to mark a shift away from the harshness of his first three films (though as memory serves it comes back in the next film).

Instead, it bears a closer resemblance to the standard image of Hong, at least pre Kim Min-hee: a man involved in filmmaking goes on a vacation, where he becomes involved with various women, who are doubled in some way. Here, that doubling is, unusually, tied to a legend that is construed as the structuring metaphor for the film instead of, as in later films, an incidental illustration. But I had also remembered the two halves — I remembered twelve chapters, but weirdly Hong seems to have been obsessed with seven-part films at this time — as being direct mirrors or similar trajectories. Instead, the second half functions more as an inversion of the first, with Kyung-soo as the pursuing party where he was pursued in the first. The chapter titles themselves are notable, describing events rather than the chapter as a whole, thereby inserting an element of gamesmanship to allow the viewer to discover what lies around what’s implied to be the “key” event: knowing that Myung-suk loves Kyung-soo shades all their interactions leading up to that point, to say nothing of her then unknown identity.

Once again, there’s a difference between the Korean title, roughly translating to Discovery of Life, and the English title, which is typically equally called On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate and just Turning Gate. I prefer the longer title, partly because of its distinction and partly because it maps on closely to the last part’s chapter title, focusing on a single moment that might very well refer to the idea set forth in the Korean title.

Hong’s screenplay in particular feels much closer to his traditional style: characters speak both more naturally and in a way that calls back to almost koan phrases — “Even though it’s difficult to be a human being, let’s not turn into monsters” is repeated at least twice, and only gets funnier in each ill-fitting context. In general, this is a much more languid film — notably, it’s the first Hong of many where there are less shots than there are minutes in the film — and that very quality is what I’m so often drawn to in Hong. The raucous strip rock-paper-scissors scene in the club is allowed to play out as comedy before shifting to a more uneasy emotional tenor; the wonderful reveal of Kyung-soo and Sun-young’s past acquaintance takes place in two extended parts, with a break outside. The sex still remains though, and Kyung-soo asking if she “likes his moves” is as mortifying as ever. In general, however, there’s an ease to the interactions, and unlike the past films there is no prescribed endpoint; Kyung-soo is allowed to drift from one person to the other, and the vacation, which only really takes a few days, floats far past the prescriptions implied by a strict structure. Even the interactions between Kyung-soo and Sung-woo feel looser than those of The Power of Kangwon Province, and this is funnier than the past three films combined; the sight gag of Sun-young’s family emerging is astonishing.

I’ve never truly speculated about Hong’s politics, but I do have to wonder what his inclusion of Scott Nearing’s autobiography The Making of a Radical might imply; it’s talked about fairly frequently, if maybe more as a prop to pass between people. It’s also very funny to rediscover that “Spiegel im Spiegel” is in this, relatively early into its omnipresence in international film for the decade.

The staging of the last sequence with Kyung-soo and Sun-young is just a marvel, with the contrasting brick wall behind them acting as a separation as surely as the broken desire between them. Of all things, it reminded me of Out 1; I haven’t talked about Jacques Rivette yet, but just as surely as Éric Rohmer he’ll be a key reference point in the films to come.

English Title: Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
Korean Title: 오! 수정/O! Su-jeong/Oh! Soo-jung
Premiere Date: April 28, 2000
U.S. Release Year: 2021
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Film Number: 3
First Viewing Number: 12
First Viewing Date: June 13, 2018
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 25
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 3
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 14
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 23
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 126 minutes (3rd longest)
Color/Black & White: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Two parts with an introduction and seven chapters each with different protagonists plus an epilogue
Recurring Actors: Moon Sung-keun (first appearance)
Season: Winter
Weather: Cold, sunny, snowy
Alcohol: Makgeolli, OB lager beer, cheongju, Chivas Regal Scotch whisky, soju, wine
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Juice, coffee
Food: Crayfish, jjamppong (also baked sweet potatoes, unidentified soup and party food)
Drinking Scenes: 10
Creative People: Filmmakers (director/producer, writer/editor), pianist, ex-painters
Academia: N/A
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 1
Family: Sister-brother
Vehicle Scenes: 4
Crying Scenes: 0
Number of Shots: 135
Number of Zooms: 0
Music Style: Plunky piano
Title Background: Black background
Voiceover: N/A

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is almost without question the first Hong (chronologically speaking) that most acolytes love, and especially on this rewatch for me it certainly resonates in the same way. Numerous hallmarks make their first appearance here: it is his first film in black-and-white (and only one this decade), his first about filmmakers — even if they appear to be more industrial, hoping to create their own films one day — and, most crucially, his first to use the kind of puzzle-box structure that overwhelmingly defined his films until recently. While The Power of Kangwon Province did have its overlapping structure, it’s used here to question, or rather rupture the reality set forth in the first half of the film.

The repetition of events, misleadingly helpfully labeled by numbered chapters — Jae-hoon’s chapter 4 is missing from Soo-jung’s, who has an added-on chapter 7 — invokes the difference in telling and/or perspective immediately, with Young-soo bolting from the table to go to the restroom instead of Jae-hoon. Additionally, the conversation about Jae-hoon formerly being able to drink 5 bottles of soju and 3 bottles of whiskey is shifted forward two chapters to fill the gap. What’s more ambiguous, in a productive sense, is the import: in general, the innocence or guilelessness of each perspective character is emphasized, as is the central unknowability of their counterpart. This makes the coda all the more strange: the finally-consummated sex is as raw and painful as hinted at before, but the bridge is slowly gulfed during both the sex and the eventual understanding with the bedsheets; the final shot is a sort of uneasy bliss, which jettisons potential other complications like Young-soo in favor of promises to do better. Because this is a Hong film, it’s definitely up in the air whether those promises will or can be met, and Soo-jung’s face is appropriately ambiguous, half doubtful and half reverie.

This is also the first Hong film where the English title, which appears to reference Duchamp, differs from the Korean title, the much less bleak Oh! Soo-jung. Besides reminding me of Powell-Pressburger’s Oh… Rosalinda!! (which I haven’t seen), it gets a pay-off with Jae-hoon’s utterance of the wrong name. But in its own way it carries a certain ambiguity: the oh! could be one of ecstasy and release or frustration and incomprehension, reactions which all occur throughout the film. It’s also one of the few named after a specific person, though there will be more later.

This film presents two distinctly contrasting actors in its main trio. Moon Sung-keun, one of Hong’s greatest stalwarts, makes his first appearance; even though he’s already almost 50, it’s disconcerting how he almost appears young compared to his later appearances; the wrinkles haven’t quite set in, and though he has a family it’s only invoked a few times. On the other hand, Lee Eun-ju, who won the Grand Bell for Best New Actress, died by suicide five years later at only 24, one of a few Hong actors who suffered an untimely death. She has something of a Kim Min-hee quality about her, especially in the second half, a certain radiance that was gone too soon. (Jeong Bo-seok is much better known as a television actor, and only sparingly appeared in films in the 2000s before leaving cinema altogether.)

According to the translations on my file, the chapter titles translate to, in order, “day of the waiting,” “or an accident,” “cable car suspension,” “a moment impulse,” and “primary.” I can’t pretend to be certain about what the second, fourth, and fifth chapters translate to, but in a certain sense the abstruseness is the point, given the wildly divergent events of certain chapters. And it’s appropriate that some of the dangling threads (especially Soo-jung’s apparently incestuous relationship with her brother and her claim not to wear a bra) are left unfulfilled, as suspended as that cable car, one of the funniest moments in Hong so far.

The black-and-white here really is gorgeous, and it’s something of a shame that this is the only one that he shot on film; I remember being totally entranced by the ice lake that Jae-hoon and Soo-jung sojurn onto, but the darkness is just as striking, especially in their makeout sessions in that outdoor park. And while I can’t say for certain yet whether winter is my favorite Hong season (though probably the most distinctive), the blanketed snow and glaring light works wonders here. There’s also three tracking shots here, contrary to my recollection; the first two are a shot-reverse-shot, and the third follows Jae-hoon as he first loses Soo-jung.

Though the filmmaking aspect is fairly deemphasized except for how it can bring Soo-jung and Young-soo together, and how it can be used to both put the latter on a pedestal and knock it down, there are some interesting bits of business, like the general sense of rancor among the crew, Kodak no longer developing 8mm, and the mention of reusing locations. Also, there are some glimpsed movie posters — A Man and a Woman, The Untouchables, Betty Blue — and music references: Beethoven’s 6th (Pastoral) and Stevie Wonder; Soo-jung is the first of several Hong musicians. Sport also forms something of a backbone, between the playing of ping-pong and badminton (in winter!).

While the sexually explicit scenes are rougher and more fraught than ever, the emotional dynamics have risen to that same level, and in some sense the elision of certain scenes like Jae-hoon’s alleyway attempt function almost on a psychological level, parceling out the uncomfortable moments and/or displacing them onto one man or the other. In the end, though Young-soo disappears for the last 15 minutes, he functions as a valuable fulcrum, along which the film’s emotional and narrative shifts sway to and fro.

This is the first of presumably a number of Hongs that has markedly improved on this watch for the viewing project, and so much of it lies in the deftness of the structure, which only gets more mysterious the further it goes along (though I did love the second half of Kangwon more than I remembered). This, even more than his interactions, probably elevates his films the most, at least in his early period; I’ll be sure to track this possible trend going forward.

English Title: The Power of Kangwon Province
Korean Title: 강원도의 힘/Gangwon-do ui him
Premiere Date: April 4, 1998
U.S. Release Year: 2021
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Film Number: 2
First Viewing Number: 19
First Viewing Date: January 2, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 24
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 2
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 19
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 26
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 110 minutes (9th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Two uneven, linear, overlapping parts with different protagonists
Recurring Actors: Baek Jong-hak (first appearance), Kim Beom-chun (first appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny, sunshower
Alcohol: Hite beer, soju, bokbunja, baekseju, Johnnie Walker Blue Label
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, Coca-Cola, orange juice, limeade(?), iced tea, water, smoothie, Pocari Sweat
Food: Bimbimbap, sea squirt, fish, fruit, dried squid, pancakes, red bean dessert
Drinking Scenes: 9
Creative People: N/A
Academia: Professors and students, unspecified subject
Vacation: 2
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 4
Family: Husband-wife
Vehicle Scenes: 9
Crying Scenes: 1
Number of Shots: 190
Number of Zooms: 0
Music Style: Strummed electric guitar, also elegant string quartet
Title Background: Black background
Voiceover: N/A

This was maybe the Hong I had the least memory of before this most recent rewatch, sandwiched as it is between his debut and arguably the first film that fully deploys his rapidly developing trademarks. But The Power of Kangwon Province really does feel in a way like his second debut film; not only is it the first film that he wrote the screenplay for solo, but it also exclusively features the static shots that defined his films for a number of years, along with a more in-depth approach to character than the four-part The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well arguably allowed for.

The first drinking scene arguably epitomizes all of these: the scene begins in media res, with Ji-sook berating Mi-sun for perceived personal slights instead of merely being a lousy drunk. The conversation flows at Hong’s more deliberate pace, and in general he seems to spend more times on these meals or drinks, in contrast to the flurry of restaurants in the previous film. He still cuts in and out on the shots though, including effectively a shot-reverse-shot as Eun-kyoung leaves the table. The scene of Ji-sook totally drunk as the cop is dragging her off the sidewalk is very fun though, and it’s worth noting that they appear to be drinking bokbunja raspberry wine, which I don’t remember seeing in a Hong before and which has apparently been scientifically proven to improve male sexual stamina.

Baek Jong-hak is apparently the only actor who appears again in a Hong film (I think as one of the sycophants in The Day He Arrives) but I was unexpectedly really transfixed by Oh Yun-hong as Ji-sook; maybe it’s because she’s the first of the protagonists to appear and the women in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, by appearing third and fourth, felt somewhat subordinated and constrained by their limited appearance. There’s something about the particular triangular friendship dynamic on vacation that feels strong, especially that early scene of them singing “My Darling Clementine” on the beach together, and which allows the frustrated relationship and fraught return to Kangwon to take on an additional resonance. It has a certain compactness, running about 40 minutes, that Sang-kwon’s much longer section can’t really have; that contrast almost embodies the difference between late and early Hong, respectively.

In general there’s a strange preoccupation with fish here, an overarching metaphor that imbues them with an overtly symbolic quality not often found in Hong’s structures. The two fish that become(?) one, the consistent consumption of fish, sea squirts, and dried squid; not exactly sure what it means, along with both Sang-kwon and Ji-sook nearly getting hit by cars pulling out of parking spaces.

The overlapping structure really is done well; Jae-wan’s order in the train car is lingered on long enough that I instinctively sensed that it must have a significance, but it doesn’t wrap around until 20 minutes into Sang-kwon’s section. There’s a certain slackness wrapped up once again in questions of employment (it’s never exactly specified what Sang-kwon teaches, intriguingly), but the vacation and its possibilities helps a lot of his interactions.

Some interesting bits of Western culture floating through this: a barely glimpsed The People vs. Larry Flynt poster, an Optimus Prime action figure, the Russian club workers, Ji-sook’s M&M shirt, the Dallas Cowboys shirt that Jae-wan wears, the use of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” There’s also a scene where Sang-kwon has something stuck in his eye, decades before Hong’s recent eye problems, and a cutaway during the first drinking scene to a lamprey a la Drive My Car.

Hong’s morbid invocation of death continues here: death by falling is invoked three separate times, including the genuine possibility that the cop might jump after being rejected by Ji-sook. The inclusion of the woman pursued by Sang-kwong and Jae-wan, aside from serving as another point of connection between the two vacations like the sea squirt restaurant (that Hong took much further in Hahaha) does feel a little thinly conceived, though the last conversation they have is good.

The shots on top of the mountain are honestly kind of stunning, including their incorporation of the actors and the distance, it makes me wonder if Hong might have considered a more self-consciously picturesque approach at one point (not to say that he doesn’t use his landscapes later on well). It’s also worth noting that Kim Young-chul won Best Newcomer in Cinematography at the Grand Bell Awards (South Korea’s Oscar equivalent).

The resolution, involving Ji-sook returning to Sang-kwon presumably after her failed connection with the cop, exists once again in a more ambiguous place. I’m inclined to think it’s real, because it’s lingered on more than usual for Hong’s dreams, though in general it has a nice mysterious quality, invoking a past history we aren’t privy to, having arrived upon them after their relationship already ended.

English Title: The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well
Korean Title: 돼지가 우물에 빠진 날/Dwaejiga umul-e ppajin nal
Premiere Date: May 15, 1996
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: VIFF (Dragons and Tigers Award), Rotterdam 1997 (Tiger Award)
Film Number: 1
First Viewing Number: 19
First Viewing Date: April 17, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 26
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 1
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 22
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 28
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 116 minutes (8th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: 35mm
Structure: Four linear parts with four successive protagonists
Recurring Actors: Kim Eui-sung (first appearance)
Season: Autumn (October-November)
Weather: Sunny and brisk
Alcohol: Soju, beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, tea, sprite, Coca-Cola
Food: Korean barbecue, fruit, tofu soup, pastry, ramen, noodle soup, dumplings, Wendy’s, cake, Häagen-Dazs bar
Drinking Scenes: 1
Creative People: Novelists, audio dubbers
Academia: N/A
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: 2
Film Screening: Yes (movie theater off-screen)
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 3
Family: Husband-wife
Vehicle Scenes: 3
Crying Scenes: 1
Number of Shots: ~258
Number of Zooms: 0
Music Style: Ominous string quartet
Title Background: Black background
Voiceover: N/A

It’s always bracing to return to early Hong, considering the relative misanthropy unleavened by the humor that surrounds them. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, as his debut, especially falls into this pattern, but I forgot how relentless the unpleasant interactions are here, which compound in such a way that it almost gestures at the surreal structures that would take root soon in his work: a client who keeps appearing to be out-of-town, a sex worker who shows up immediately after a glimpsed moment of lovers quarreling, a pestering movie theater owner. Korean Movie Database also says that this was originally a novel by Koo Hyo-seo, and that four other writers in addition to Hong worked on its adaptation.

The first shot is a restive shot of small fruit that Hyo-seop, the only typically Hongian main character in the film as a bumbling novelist — fittingly played by Kim Eui-sung, the only Hong regular but who nevertheless doesn’t recur until much later — steals from his neighbor’s rooftop garden. There’s another potted plant outside a coffee shop later on, but unlike On the Beach at Night Alone or Grass there’s a different subject: an insect scurrying around that Hyo-seop is poking at.

Sex is common in Hong’s early films, but the frequency here is surprising, though it dovetails at least somewhat with the need for each of the four protagonists to find intimacy; the one that really sticks out is the atypical use of sex as punctuation, where a friend of the second protagonist (Park Jin-sung) ostensibly refuses to take him back to the office he’s visiting because he’s waiting on an important fax, only to have very loud and explicit sex with his wife; the last time both characters are seen. The Korean hentai(?) is also a nastier touch than usual.

The four-part structure is more pointedly deployed than I remembered, charting each part of this love rectangle; I had assumed that it was just a network narrative of people meeting by chance, and thus the return of various characters, especially Park’s and Lee Eung-kyeong’s, was rather deftly deployed. It also allows for there to be a ton of food scenes, though the only one that feels lingered on in the traditional Hong way is the Korean barbecue scene, which is presumably the only time Hong will film actual fighting, as fittingly sloppy as it is (with wild handheld to boot). And I’ll never not be amused by seeing baby-faced Song Kang-ho as the cool friend; love the unexpected inclusions of Western culture via Wendy’s, The Simpsons, the Beatles’ “Old Brown Shoe,” and The Shawshank Redemption.

As far as I can remember, this is the only Hong film that has tracking shots, seven in total, though none of them are extravagant and they’re mostly used as little push-ins, which nearly presage the zoom shots. There’s also two dissolves, both deployed on bus-rides, which only crop up again much later. Some moments of shot-reverse-shot, but it never really feels like true continuity shooting; characters are allowed to speak their full lines before cutting, and while there are probably more shots in this than in the last five Hongs combined, a fair amount are inserts on objects or establishing shots.

For all the gloominess here, there’s a certain warmth to little interactions that brings it a little closer to later Hong: the man who Kim gives money to in jail (weird to see Hong film a courtroom), the apple-eating and odd barricade-hopping that Kim’s former friends do immediately after leaving for drinking, the general relationship between Cho and her coworker.

I forgot that this remained a little bit more ambiguous concerning whether Kim and Cho Eun-sook were actually killed in the ending (though presumably Lee is actually talking with Kim on the phone in the end, rendering it a dream sequence), and in general the apparent Taiwanese New Wave influence of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang is even stronger than I remembered; the last scene is a virtual mirror of The River, with some calm laying-out of newspapers for extra measure.