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.

English Title: Hahaha
Korean Title: 하하하
Premiere Date: May 6, 2010
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: Cannes (Prix Un Certain Regard)
Film Number: 10
First Viewing Number: 14
First Viewing Date: September 1, 2018
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 8
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 11
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 16
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 8
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 116 minutes (6th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color and Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear with two alternating protagonists, light repetition
Recurring Actors: Kim Sang-kyung (third appearance), Yoo Joon-sang (second appearance), Ye Ji-won (second appearance), Moon So-ri (second appearance), Gi Ju-bong (second appearance), Kim Yeong-ho (second appearance), Youn Yuh-jung (first appearance)
Season: Summer
Weather: Rainy, cloudy, windy, sunny
Alcohol: Soju, makgeolli, Hite beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Water, coffee, iced tea
Food: Globefish soup, watermelon, pig intestine, oyster, banchan, seafood, sea snails, peanuts, cake, tofu soup, dried squid
Drinking Scenes: 11
Creative People: Poets, film director, film critic, theatre actor, curator
Academia: Professors
Vacation: 3
Dream Sequences: 1
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 4
Family: Son-mother
Vehicle Scenes: 4
Crying Scenes: 6
Number of Shots: 89 + 37 stills
Number of Zooms: 35 out, 68 in
Music Style: Calm synth piano and strings, pensive piano
Title Background: Stills
Voiceover: 2

What helps distinguish Hong’s prolific career from those of, say, Koreeda Hirokazu, Johnnie To, or Miike Takashi is what his detractors would call laziness/repetitiveness and what his acolytes call a perceived effortlessness, a simplicity of means and production that yields endless variations. If I’m not mistaken, Hahaha, one of the greatest Hongs that didn’t play in the New York Film Festival, is the very first film produced solely by Jeonwonsa — the now familiar and totally charming logo of four people at play at last makes its debut here (edit: there’s a ball that doesn’t appear in the other iterations of the logo) — and the first one made under his similarly patented if insane working method: each day of shooting, he wakes up at 4 AM and writes the scenes and dialogue for the day; only the locations, the actors, the broad outlines of the characters, and maybe a minimal treatment are set beforehand, and after quick dialogue memorizations the scenes are filmed. Despite what might appear to be a complex structure, full of consideration for character movements and relationships, Hahaha feels beholden to this method on its first try in the best way possible: like many of Hong’s best films, it transforms, embodying so many of his predilections in a narrative that plays it both ways, propelling him into his middle period with one eye gazing back.

Fittingly, even though Hahaha features two male protagonists instead of the sole woman that comes to define his middle period films, it almost plays like an intertwining of two separate films with shared characters, each tackling different concerns with each man that come together harmoniously. Much of this tight-knit quality comes from the steady rhythm of only a few scenes at a time, carefully alternating between the two perspectives while making the chronological connections logical. I had forgotten that the only time that Moon-kyung and Joong-sik are actually in the same scene is the hilarious hanger beating from the former’s mother — it’s so weird to think a Hong actor has an Academy Award; Youn Yuh-jung’s brusque tenderness is put to great use in both this film and the middle period — while the latter is passed out in the backroom. Incidentally, Joong-sik might be the first Hong protagonist that’s especially vulnerable to alcohol; he gets hangovers multiple times, which happen in Hong’s films surprisingly rarely, considering the amount of alcohol ingested.

Instead, their links are established by the supporting characters and those oh-so-lovely black-and-white stills — potential references to Out 1 perhaps. Of course, they’re presented in a deliberately contrasting style from the main film: black-and-white freeze-frames versus color video. But it also evokes a certain sense of time standing still that Hong hasn’t necessarily explored much: by only capturing these fleeting moments of drinking, captured in voiceover that actually feels like dialogue in their little chuckles and clinking of makgeolli bowls, the sense of time is completely at sea. The viewer has no clue how much they’ve drunk or how long they’ve been talking, but is allowed to simply wonder and enjoy the company of these two friends. Their early intent to only talk about the pleasant parts of their vacations isn’t necessarily met, but this narrative existing on top of another narrative casts a nostalgic, almost wistful feeling over the whole proceedings, a warmth not really found in early Hong.

What Hahaha does otherwise, however, is both an elaboration and examination of little truisms espoused by Hong characters in the past, expanding it to essentially become a film about worldviews and how they affect relationships. Motifs recur: both men are caught outside Seong-ok’s door like Kim Sang-kyung in On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate — indeed, Moon-kyung is essentially the same character as Kim’s in that film and in Tale of Cinema — and there’s even a similar ferry ride; the bare apartment that Jeong-ho occupies weirdly reminds me of the end of The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. Moon-kyung’s sexual prowess seems to be a direct reference to his moves in On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate.

But the impetus for the film’s most fascinating concerns comes from none other than Jung Yu-mi’s character in Like You Know It All; while her full ascendancy to middle Hong icon hasn’t occurred yet, her monologue becomes the source of potential revelation for Moon-kyung, albeit delivered in an amazing dream sequence by Admiral Yi — played by Kim Yeong-ho, the lead of Night and Day. Whether through Jesus or through this 16th century hero of Tongyeong, the advice feels divinely inspired, the exhortation to only look at the good things in life handed down to people awestruck by the experience.

Of course, in Hong’s world things are never so simple, and in a near-miraculous transference the sentiment seems to pass from Moon-kyung to Joong-sik — who had previously been talking about cowardice and struggling with commitment — during the latter’s acupuncture, albeit with a twist: the general command to look at things differently is refined to occupy one person’s perspective: Yeon-joo, who has a happier outcome than her role as the first lover in On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate. This reframing might also be connected to the structure of the film; even more than most Hong films, each scene is presented as explicitly the point of view of its protagonist, without the counterbalancing of something like Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. While some moments are hilarious in the way that the storyteller doesn’t seem to understand how he might be viewed — Moon-kyung following Seong-ok to her house, the unpleasant encounter with the beggar — there’s generally a greater affection for the characters that, while still carrying no small amount of satire, doesn’t come close to the repeated failures of Kyeong-nam in Like You Know It All.

The love hexagon that seems to develop in Hahaha — even though Joong-sik and Yeon-joo don’t get entangled with anyone else despite the former’s eyeing of Jeong-hwa’s figure — is as absurd as anything Hong’s done yet, and, along with Moon-kyung’s mother and the curator, helps this to be his fullest portrait yet of a place, albeit that of Tongyeong as experienced by full-fledged summer vacationers. By virtue of all these chance encounters and recurring places, the town does truly feel small, one where couplings can arise without warning; I don’t think Jeong-ho and Jeong-hwa ever cross paths onscreen until they are seen entering the hotel together. The moment when a hotel door opens after Moon-kyung and Seong-ok enter the hotel and nobody emerges is even more well-timed than when Moon-kyung’s mother emerges and walks the other way just as the couple leaves.

Likewise, this is maybe the first Hong that truly delves into artistic sensibilities, aside from maybe a few scenes in Night and Day. The communal nature of poetry, an art that’s convenient to depict due to it being fairly short in audible form, is established early on, helping both to make Jeong-ho look more ridiculous in his youthful obsession and to capture some measure of growth on Moon-kyung and Joong-sik’s parts. It also gives Joong-sik and Jeong-ho the chance on multiple occasions to debate viewpoints — faux-existentialism vs. self-truth, sensitivity vs. insensitivity — in conversations that get across the nature of intellectual dialogue in a way no Hong film has truly tackled before. As a great counter-balance, there’s the women also sitting at the table; Hong uses them as a way to deflate what could be circular arguments, especially in how he zooms in to isolate them in the frame. On the flip side, Seong-ok’s speech — Moon So-ri is another of the great Hong regulars of this period, though I don’t quite recall her roles at the moment — almost plays like the historian’s version of Kyeong-nam’s passionate response in the Q&A in Like You Know It All, artistry/work as self-expression that should be vigorously protected.

Hahaha walks a fine line in maintaining an even tone (if not intent) and consistent characters without ever making it too obvious for one or the other man that they’ve been talking about the same people. It helps, of course, that Moon-kyung only ever encounters Jeong-ho at the latter’s most extreme levels of emotion — the ability to take a punch seems like an extension of the arm-wrestling in Night and Day and Like You Know It All, with Moon-kyung describing the onlookers’ awe (or perhaps pity) in a similar manner to the onlookers in those films. There’s a measure of compartmentalization that feels true to the way people live their lives: Seong-ok having an argument with Jeong-ho before going to work where she meets Moon-kyung; the two of them having a reasonable conversation after the rancor of the previous night.

While Moon-kyung is clearly the center of his story, remaining pretty focused on his courtship of Seong-ok while also incorporating his relationship with his mother and desire to see good in his deceased father, Joong-sik — in keeping with Yoo Jun-sang’s leading roles in Hong films to come — often comes across as an observer more than a participant, his relative fidelity to Yeon-joo (at the expense of his fidelity to his wife and family) leading him to be nominally overshadowed by Jeong-ho’s demonstrativeness, his depression and conspicuous attempts to cope the precise opposite of Moon-kyung’s brazen confidence and lack of self-awareness. It’s only when he’s alone or with her that he truly takes center stage, watermelon eating to rival Lee Kang-sheng; his rueful observation that you “can’t win with women” exists on a perfect seesaw with the expression on his face when he finds Yeon-joo in the blanket shop.

The emotional dynamics within scenes tend to be more stretched out, especially in the intellectual/artistic debates and the great confrontation between Moon-kyung and Seong-ok in the hotel lobby; the throwing down of grass calls to mind all manner of plants in Hong’s cinema, including the latter’s love of flowers. It also allows for more unexpected forms of transference, including the mother-son-like relationship that develops between Moon-kyung and Jeong-ho, the latter staying behind and essentially taking his place/hat/apartment. And the scene with Joong-sik’s uncle is handled so well, a cut covering so much drinking in order to cast away cowardice; the theater faux-soju drinking scene is reminiscent of the one in Tale of Cinema, and also probably isn’t too far off from how Hong handles his scenes.

It really is perfect how well Hahaha reflects this moment of transition for Hong, where the supposedly subordinate or less assertive storyline slowly becomes the one that triumphs over the more identifiably early period narrative. Yoo, of course, will appear in many Hongs to come, and his tender commitments to Yeon-joo on that bus to close out the film without a visual return to the friends almost plays as a response to the numerous scenes of anguish on buses in the earliest Hong films. Kim, on the other hand, makes his last Hong appearance here; his declarations of purity ultimately come to naught, foiled by fate and preexisting connections, and Tongyeong returns to its previous state — Jeong-ho’s apparent rejection of Jeong-hwa in favor of reconnecting with Seong-ok completes the circle of its own side narrative as Moral Tale. While Kim’s heard in the closing moments, he’s last seen on the ferry from behind, gazing into the water. After the film he’s presumably off to experience Canada; maybe he’s still living out there in Hong’s multiverse.

The globefish soup that’s remarked upon and consumed so often in Hahaha provides a handy metaphor for what makes this Hong film so special for me. While it’s specifically mentioned as Moon-kyung’s mother’s restaurant’s staple, the two men seem to automatically assume that they ate at different places and met with different people. The perspective of Hong films before has been of one person, caught in their own repetitions; of course this film has some in its recurring motifs of poem writing and reuse of restaurants and places. But starting here and going forward, the perspective is becoming more universal and able to capture the “infinite worlds possible,” yet at the same time Hahaha casts Tongyeong as a kind of sandbox and area of exploration. The play of perspectives and self-realizations with the same figures and places is such a joy to watch, even if the men can’t see it; even self-enlightenment doesn’t mean you can know it all.

English Title: Lost in the Mountains
Korean Title: 첩첩산중/Cheobcheobsanjung/In the Mountains
Premiere Date: August 14, 2009
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: Locarno
Film Number: N/A
First Viewing Number: N/A
First Viewing Date: March 22, 2018
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): 14
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 25
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 31 minutes (27th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: JD Video
Structure: Linear
Recurring Actors: Jung Yu-mi (second appearance), Moon Sung-keun (second appearance), Lee Sun-kyun (second appearance), Kim Jin-kyung (first appearance)
Season: Autumn
Weather: Sunny
Alcohol: Soju, Hite beer
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee, water, Coca-Cola
Food: Hot pot, banchan, tofu soup
Drinking Scenes: 2
Creative People: Writers
Academia: Writing professor and students
Vacation: 1
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Daughter-mother
Vehicle Scenes: 1
Crying Scenes: 3
Number of Shots: 43
Number of Zooms: 4 out, 12 in
Music Style: Dramatic piano
Title Background: Shot of Mi-sook driving
Voiceover: Yes

I’m finally getting into the phase of Hong’s work where I’ve seen the films multiple times, his style is becoming even more familiar, and it’s even harder than before for me to be anywhere close to objective and not get caught up in the intensely humorous sweep of his films. “Lost in the Mountains,” as Hong’s first short, presents an especially interesting case study in my history with Hong. When I first started getting into Hong, even though I mostly started with the shorter work I felt that a certain duration was essential to his comedy, lengthening out the possibilities of each scene, and so I had a hard time believing that it would translate well to a short. I always viewed “Lost in the Mountains” as basically a compression, smushing the action of one of his normal films into half an hour; ironically I wrote my first and one of my only full-length pieces on it with this idea in mind. But I loved it to a much greater degree on this third watch; maybe I’ve just fallen even more for Hong’s style, or maybe “Lost in the Mountains” has an intent and importance in Hong’s evolution all its own.

As with everything Hong, both due to his productivity and the generative force rewatches provide, analyses are always shifting. Case in point: I just mentioned Sean Gilman’s three-period thesis yesterday, but he issued a new division today: The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well to Like You Know It All, “Lost in the Mountains” to Claire’s Camera, The Day After to the present, with the former two presaged by the last part of Woman on the Beach and Right Now, Wrong Then respectively. That makes sense to me, and it’s especially fascinating that the dividing films both come in multi-film years for Hong. I’ll obviously get into this as we go on, but taking “Lost in the Mountains” specifically as the first film of the middle Hong period makes this short much more significant than it initially appears.

Produced as part of the omnibus film Visitors, which was the 2009 iteration of the Jeonju Digital Project, an initiative by the Jeonju International Film Festival to fund three directors’ short films — Hong’s compatriots were Lav Diaz and Kawase Naomi — “Lost in the Mountains” feels as essential as any of his features. While it appears to be shot on standard-definition video, if it isn’t merely an old transfer — this is one of two Hong films that doesn’t have a strong HD release — it both fits in and breaks from Hong’s previously established aesthetic. The opening and closing are especially notable: quick cuts between tall buildings — apartments in Seoul, motels in the mountains of Jeonju — which recall, of all things, Alain Resnais’s epochal Muriel, or the Time of Return; Richard Brody has compared Hong to Resnais, which I don’t feel nearly as strongly as Rivette or Rohmer though it’s worth considering. Aside from establishing a link between the two cities, it also acts as a kind of reminder of the odd oppressiveness of the city that Mi-sook can’t escape from.

“Lost in the Mountains” isn’t really an oppressive film though. Like You Know It All was a perfect send-off to Hong’s early period; while extremely funny, it definitely represented a certain apotheosis of the relatively straightforward skewering of Korean men. Now, the Jung Yu-mi era has arrived, a collection of films nearly as significant to Hong as his initial run of Kim Min-hee films. The main trio of Jung Yu-mi, Moon Sung-keun — looking a good deal older nine years after Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors — and Lee Sun-kyun recurs again in Oki’s Movie, and Lee establishes himself during this period as just as vital as Jung. The other two key actors in the short, Kim Jin-kyoung (edit: she appears again in Oki’s Movie) and Eun Hee-kyung, on the other hand, appear to have only acted this one time, though their presences are very game.

But while it breaks from her perspective a few times and the roundelay of people is a treat, “Lost in the Mountains” belongs to Jung, as forcefully as any male Hong protagonist thus far. Hers is the first female voiceover, which narrates action more directly than in his features, likely for runtime reasons; even post-nudity Hong would have probably shown some of the “weird stuff” that Mi-sook and Jeon attempt in the motel. She is also given some exquisite moments of sheer abandon which only his men possessed before (save perhaps Mun-suk in Woman on the Beach, this period’s precursor): her assertion that she’ll sleep with every man before she dies, her request for Myung-woo to kiss her and subsequent mortifying make-out session at the same table as Jin-young, and most of all her fed-up tossing of the coffee cup, one of my very favorite Hong moments.

There is also a greater sense of purpose amid the hopelessness that Mi-sook feels, which is amped up to a degree that registers more fervently as comedy than it did for Hong in the past. Her quest to become a strong writer is articulated more clearly than, say, Kyeong-nam’s search for his identity in Like You Know It All or even Jung-rae’s attempt to write his script in Woman on the Beach; even though her visit to Jeonju is impromptu (it’s so amusing how she asserts her lack of fear of driving), she tries to make the step of going to the writer’s house; that she so quickly crumples after the writer remembers seeing her with Jeon yesterday heightens the scenario all the more. I don’t remember if this same drive is articulated all throughout this middle period, but it’s definitely a shift.

What really shifted for me on this watch of “Lost in the Mountains,” besides the greater hilarity I found, is how tightly constructed it is without feeling plotty; it feels truly driven by Mi-sook’s impulses, breaking away from the group when it gets unbearable. The set of three phone calls that each ex-student makes to Jeon is truly deft, and the quick agglomeration of all this detail etches out this particular culture as surely as in his stronger features.

English Title: Like You Know It All
Korean Title: 잘 알지도 못하면서/Jal Aljido Mot-hamyeonseo/Even Though You Do Not Know It That Well
Premiere Date: May 14, 2009
U.S. Release Year: N/A
Festival: Cannes (Director’s Fortnight)
Film Number: 9
First Viewing Number: 20
First Viewing Date: June 28, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 16
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 9
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 23
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 17
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 126 minutes (4th longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Two uneven, linear parts in different locations separated by twelve days, moderate repetition
Recurring Actors: Kim Tae-woo (third appearance), Uhm Ji-won (second appearance), Go Hyun-jung (second appearance), Jung Yu-mi (first appearance), Yoo Jun-sang (first appearance), Seo Young-hwa (first appearance), Moon So-ri (first appearance), Park Su-min (first appearance)
Season: Summer (August-September)
Weather: Sunny, rain
Alcohol: Soju, Ballantine’s scotch, Hite and Cass beer, makgeolli
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Water, tea, orange juice, Pepsi
Food: Bean sprout soup with gochujang, sashimi, gondre rice, banchan, squid, shrimp, fried pancake, crackers, fruit, cherry tomatoes, peanuts
Drinking Scenes: 10
Creative People: Film directors, painter, sculptor, ballet dancer, actress, critic, film festival workers
Academia: Film and painting professors and students
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: 1
Film Screening: 2 (no film shown)
Films Within Films: N/A
Q&A: 1 (classroom)
Naps: 2
Family: Husband-wife
Vehicle Scenes: 1
Crying Scenes: 2
Number of Shots: 93
Number of Zooms: 47 out, 81 in
Music Style: Light strings and harp and xylophone, pensive synth
Title Background: Gray paper
Voiceover: Yes

The great and difficult thing about Hong, or at least many of his admirers’ relationships with him (including myself), is how even great films that would be towards the top of many other directors’ filmographies are *merely* very strong; it was especially the case in my first run-through of his work from 2016-2019 that I would form notions about his films, or perhaps judge them too hastily based on the experience I’ve had with his other works. Probably no film suffered as much as Like You Know It All, which had almost grown into my mind as his The Wayward Cloud (which I still haven’t rewatched), an uncharacteristically nasty film — by this point in his career — that I nevertheless found quite fun to watch. The film is acidic in its own way, but its virtues have grown considerably for me — many consider this to be among Hong’s funniest films, I didn’t agree until this watch — and the weaknesses more integrated into an overall coherent statement.

First, Like You Know It All is his most engagement with the film world yet, with the first third taking place at the Jecheon International Music & Film Festival — running from August 14-19, with the Jecheon Summmer 2008 setting laid out in a streamlined version to the opening title cards in Night and Day — and the second two-thirds set at and around a film school on Jeju Island. He finally shoots inside a movie theater itself, with two priceless depictions of film festival jurors (including Kyeong-nam) falling asleep; makes multiple mentions of DVD screeners including the totally plausible idea that Kyeong-nam wouldn’t own a copy of his own film; and finally includes the first of his hilariously contentious Q&A sequences, though this one only shows one question and takes place in a classroom setting. It’s also so strange to see a White person so initially prominent; I don’t think Michael Wayne Rodgers, who plays Robert, is/was an actual film critic, but he’s hilarious in this. Kyeong-nam’s rootlessness about his lack of financial success despite his renown is incredibly funny. I have to think Hong is speaking at least a little through him where he talks about his creative process as involving “no preconceived ideas,” where he discovers and gathers pieces that he thinks are precious, often from his own life, though I don’t believe he thinks of himself as a philosopher, or that he would consider his films to have “no beautiful images” whatsoever.

Like You Know It All also marks the start of a phase of Hong career that stretched through 2014, which isn’t necessarily related to artistry but rather reputation. Of course, I wasn’t remotely aware of the festival circuit at this time, but it’s very notable that this is the first Hong that wasn’t selected for the New York Film Festival since he was first chosen with On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate. Richard Brody pointed specifically to Manohla Dargis’s scathing New York Times NYFF review of Night and Day as potentially swaying the selection committee, and since this was an era where the NYT did have a great sway over NYFF programming I’m inclined to believe him. This touched off a fraught period of years of distribution for Hong’s films, where it was seemingly arbitrary whether his films would get distribution or even get into NYFF; I wouldn’t put it on this film at all of course, even if it does paint a biting portrait of the film festival world, but it is a noticeable trend.

But, as much as this is a film about the film festival world, I completely failed to notice when I first watched — partly because I was hopping back and forth between early and late Hong chronologically, as per Evan Morgan’s suggestion — that Like You Know It All is perhaps Hong’s most sustained character study yet, which is odd because it’s also probably his most purely Kafkaesque film. Every other film relies more on multiple protagonists and/or structure (even On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, where Kyung-soo is more of an avatar); it could be argued that Soon eventually assumes a similar status as Yoo-jeong from Night and Day, but, despite her substantial dimensionality, she’s featured slightly less.

Kyeong-nam, however, remains front and center throughout all of Like You Know It All; the title is even spoken aloud by Soon, and every situation involves, to one degree or another, an intensely surreal and out-of-control situation coupled with his insensitivity and inability to, as Soon says, take things as they are, to be content with what’s in front of his face. It really is absurd how many people he totally alienates or harms, and the means by which Hong carries this out call back to the extremity of his earliest films: the dreamed death of Sang-yong, carried out so long that it’s only in the last few moments that it registers as unreal; Hyeon-hee’s off-screen rape, which is as unpleasant as the one in Woman Is the Future of Man, perhaps too much so, though she is given more space to speak than in that film; Sang-yong’s attack of Kyeong-nam; the neighbors that catch Kyeong-nam and Soon in flagrante delicto and threaten him with grass cutters.

Each of these comes without warning, things suddenly sprung upon Kyeong-nam; even though he is the main character (in his last of three appearances for Hong), he almost seems to be playing the side characters that disappeared in Woman Is the Future of Man and Woman on the Beach, made into a disgruntled observer that is at the mercy of capricious people and fates, even as he unconsciously does his best to worsen his position. The sequence with him on the riverbed and running out to sea, weirdly reminiscent of The 400 Blows, is a thrilling and necessary respite, and it’s so wickedly funny how he initially seems to find love with Soon, only to find that he’s completely misunderstood the situation.

Hong really goes wild with the zooms here; there are very nearly the same amount of zoom ins alone compared to shots, and they’re generally used here to heighten the tension of the scene or intently focus on faces to a greater degree than before. Part of the reason is the picturesque, summery settings; I think this is the first Hong film that takes place entirely outside of Seoul, though I could be mistaken, and he freely shows off the pretty skies and beaches before zooming back to the characters. There are also some longer takes and pans to follow characters as they traipse through the landscape; the shot where Kyeong-nam looks across the hotel balcony to see Hyeon-hee being comforted genuinely gets across the unexpected voyeurism.

This is also a slow-boil approach to doubling that Hong hasn’t quite opted for before; partially due to the longer runtime of the second two-thirds, Cheon-soo and Soon don’t appear for quite a while, and initially their closer ties to Kyeong-nam would seem to obscure their parallels with Sang-yong and Shin. But it’s fascinating how Hong shuffles little things around, like Kyeong-nam’s confessions of his admiration for Jin-sook and Kyeong-nam while drinking, and unnerving duplicated objects like the rock, which make the final third Kyeong-nam’s alternate take on and failure to totally avoid the traps of the first third, though he does get free of the school drama.

Like You Know It All is probably Hong’s most metatextual use of actors yet, while also introducing a shocking number of his most valuable repertory players in small parts, like in Night and Day. Kim Tae-woo as Kyeong-nam has already been covered. Sang-yong is played by Uhm Ji-won, the actress in Tale of Cinema, who has a similar total rejection of the main character, though she has a much smaller role. Soon is played by Go Hyun-jung, the Woman on the Beach, who also is afforded a certain freedom (in both promiscuity and lack of restrictive bonds) and is last seen leaving a beach; she is the only one who reappears in a Hong film, albeit only for a cameo. By contrast, Jung Yu-mi, Yoo Jun-sang, and Seo Young-hwa all make their first appearances. Already, their personas seem partially set. Jung is open and talks freely — the invocations of Jesus here have the same feeling of vague absurdity as in Night and Day, though it’s ambiguous what exactly Kyeong-nam did besides calling her not an angel. Yoo is a great blusterer, initially presenting a gregarious veneer but frequently veering off into domineering behavior. Even in a small part (she’s never led a Hong film), Seo has that same beatific quality as later on; Kyeong-nam calls her his favorite actor, and there’s an appropriate distance that’s maintained, she steers clear of most of the drama and exits the hotel room before the amazing drinking contest between Hyeon-hee and Jeong-hee — hilariously described in contemptuous voiceover as a porn actress who appeared in a “bogus art film” — begins.

Arm wrestling returns once again from Night and Day; it really is odd how well the protagonists do against the younger men, beating them soundly, and Hong apparently believes that men get better at arm wrestling the older they are. Even though Cheon-soo is a painter (a local hero) and Seong-nam mentions that his arm is incredibly strong from the continued exertion of painting, he doesn’t actually arm wrestle, and the man Kyeong-nam loses to is basically only present in two scenes, almost a personification of the mysterious forces that swirl around him.

That mystery is what compelled me anew about Like You Know It All, the continued emphasis on identity, the most important things in life, and the necessity to know one’s own self and desires. It’s implicitly what drives Kyeong-nam through these odd encounters, along with his desire to just get his duties over with — despite the beautiful settings and pronounced hangout feeling, neither trip is a vacation. But he is continually stymied by his inability to understand people or read situations, all of which respond to him in kind and lead him drifting; even if this does run a bit long, Hong’s drift is so pleasurable to experience.

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.