Like You Know It All: Just One Second... That May Change

There's something unconcernedly unplanned about Like You Know It All, as if director Hong Sang-soo had daily provided his actors with a single page of rushed dialogue then let them go at it for a few hours. Hong lets his actors loose on the story, lets their impulsive reactions build into something bigger, lets a random idea in the performance or an ad libbed line used to cover a flub as the guiding force for what follows. Or so it seems. Is art-house darling Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) destined to clash with festival programmer Hyeon-hee (Uhm Ji-won) then doomed to reunite with a former lover (Go Hyun-jung)? These encounters hardly seem inevitable. (Who else would throw in a series of arm wrestling matches?) Instead, the realities almost come out of nowhere, as if the unexpected always lied just around the corner. So while the film starts off as a satire about a film festival, full of ass-kissing, back-stabbing, and self-congratulatory artistes -- Like You Know It All ditches that party just at the point when you likely would've grown weary of it yourself. Hong recognizes how boring life is, how repetitious, how squalid, how petty, how hilarious, how misdirected, how laughable. Oh, how wonderful he is!

I laughed a lot during Like You Know It All, perhaps more so than in Hahaha. But Like You Know It All doesn't have that latter film's clever framing device -- a boozy flashback shared by two friends recounting congruent memories. Hong's great at framing devices. Think of the films within films of Oki's Movie or Isabelle Huppert in triplicate for In Another Country. But when you come down to it, I like Hong equally -- if not better -- without the structural cleverness. Meandering, his movies feel fresh and human and vulnerable and ridiculous. Like You Know It All is hardly his most brilliant piece of filmmaking to his credit but it's brilliant all the same.

Footnote: Like You Know It All was shot on HD but is that even newsworthy anymore?

Hahaha: Taking a Page Out of Woody Allen's Book

I don't know why the similarities between Woody Allen and Hong Sang-soo never occurred to me before. They're both directors who crank out a movie a year, and primarily focus on troubled romances -- sometimes seriously, other times comically, oft times of the summer/winter variety, occasionally triangles. They're both critical darlings who have won more than a handful of awards -- both nationally and internationally -- yet neither could be called a box-office goldmine. They also have a small group of actors they reuse in multiple movies then were drawn to casting bigger names later in their careers. For Hong, that last bit has led to Isabelle Hupert in In Another Country and pop star Rain in Soar Into the Sun. Since Hong is a master of naturalistic acting, neither celeb upstages his or her co-stars.

One way that Hong differs from Allen, however, is in his constant use of drunk scenes. In Hahaha, not only is the framework a drunk scene -- two friends recount their overlapping weekend in a small coastal town called Tongyeong -- but so are about a quarter of the events they recount: failed filmmaker Moon-kyeong (Kim Sang-kyung) taking Seong-ok (Moon So-ri) back to a hotel room, depressed critic Joong-sik (Yu Jun-sang) taking his mistress (Ye Ji-won) to meet his uncle, Moon-kyeong's mother (Yoon Yeo-jeong) drinking with all of the above at some point or another. Because it's a Hong Sang-soo film, the drunk scenes are universally good. No one facilitates as many riveting naturalistic performances as Hong.

Both Allen and Hong are experimenters with form, too. Here in Hahaha that manifests itself with the framing conversation that takes place in the present being merely a voiceover to a black-and-white slideshow of Moon-kyeong and Joong-sik toasting, talking and saying "Cheers!" But unlike Allen, Hong isn't one of the leads nor does he cast himself in a cameo. He's got a history of having stand-ins for the alcoholic, womanizing, deluded artist we assume him to be and here he does it in triplicate, the third version being a fickle poet (Kim Kang-woo) who's not only the best friend of pill-popping critic Joong-sik but also a surrogate son to man-child Moon-kyeong's mom who gives the poet a free apartment once Moon-kyeong turns it down.

This is the 10th Hong Sang-soo movie I've seen! (I'm ready for more!)

Oki's Movie: Hong Sang-soo's Echo Chamber

Oh, Hong Sang-soo. Here you go again, you myopic auteur, with your tried-and-true tropes: The philandering filmmaker who drinks too much, the winter-summer romance that doesn't add up, the backstabbing frenemy who for awhile takes the lead, the love triangle that breaks apart then forms anew with somewhat interchangeable people. And also once again, from me, a lot of eye-rolling that culminates with a double-take caused by a narrative twist or a genius piece of dialogue or a stretch of naturalistic acting that really is without peer in Korean cinema, all of which makes me second guess myself and you and what the whole point of movie-watching/making is.

In short Oki's Movie feels both like standard Hong fare and a fresh experiment. A collection of faux student shorts examining the ever-changing relationships of a college film professor (Mun Seong-kun), his protege (Lee Seon-gyun) and the young woman (Jeong Yu-mi) having affairs with them both, Oki's Movie initially feels like typically Hong Sang-soo in the worst way and ends up feeling like typical Hong Sang-soo in the best. The change of heart in the viewer comes late in the game, thanks to two scenes: One, in which the two students -- arriving late to class on a snow day -- are encouraged by the teacher to ask whatever they want which they do with hilarious results; the second, a longer sequence in which a walk in the woods, taken by the young woman first with the professor, then with the student, is compared via short back-to-back footage that, in a very telling way, illustrates what Hong is a master of -- showing the significance of the most seemingly insignificant moments and actions.

As much as I eventually came to appreciate, even like, Oki's Movie, I admit there's still a part of me that wishes that Hong came up with a different plot more often instead of treading familiar ground. But given how prolific he's been of late -- three movies in 2009, two in 2010, two in 2011, one in 2012, and three in 2013 -- I suppose it's inevitable that he repeat himself. To his credit, he does so inventively.

In Another Country: Falling in Love With the Lifeguard All Over Again

Isabelle Huppert in a Korean movie? That's right. It's Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country, a melancholic diversion of three interconnected shorts featuring the transplanted French actress as a bewitching director, a philandering businesswoman and a jilted wife -- each with the same foreign accent. Before you get hung up on Huppert's undifferentiated vocal work, consider this: Hong hasn't cast Huppert to display a Meryl Streep-like range. He's cast her because he recognizes her as a kindred spirit. He knows she's capable of excelling at the in-the-moment acting that exemplifies his films at their best. Indeed, Huppert's proficiency at playing the moments between the moments is most apparent in the opening vignette during which she's largely listening to conversations in Korean she cannot understand in full but nevertheless intuits in good part. If the latter scenes don't allow her to silently upstage her cast mates two more times, they at least show she's in good company with co-stars like Yoon Yeo-jeong, Moon So-ri, and Jeong Yu-mi who match her meaningful glance for meaningful glance as a best friend, a jealous wife and a hotel worker respectively.

The men don't fare as well though. Kwon Hye-hyo may be fine as a hard-drinking man on the make but neither Kim Yong-ok nor Moon Sung-keun are even passably believable as a none-too-clever monk and a mildly amorous director. The nuances of Hong's deceptively simple dialogue escapes them both completely. The only male actor who actually holds his own with the actresses is, ironically enough, beefcake Yoo Joon-sang. Emerging from the waves like a God of Love for each of Huppert's ladies abroad, Yoo's performance as a dimwitted lifeguard isn't mining subtext so much as it's conveying good-natured incomprehension. Flirting in a language he hasn't mastered, he's a consistently humorous counterpart to Huppert's ennui in triplicate. Who wouldn't fall in love with him? And who wouldn't ditch him without remorse soon thereafter?

The Day He Arrives: Drink, Eat and Be Melancholic

Dear Hong Sang-soo,

I'd like to offer you a public apology. After years of bad-mouthing your films and trashing them through reviews on my website and elsewhere, I've come to see the error of my ways. You are indeed a great filmmaker and if I don't like all your movies, the ones I do like, I do so with unrestrained enthusiasm. Count The Day He Arrives in this latter category. Much like the heart-wrenching Woman Is the Future of Man and the despairing The Power of Kangwon Province, your 2011 pic The Day He Arrives is an exquisite picaresque in which a seemingly directionless narrative somehow leads us to a greater appreciation of the inherent tragedy of life.

That you're able to convey such depths of emotions from chance encounters, that you consistently pull such naked performances from your actors, that you can revisit your ironic stand-in, the cad-director (an ingratiating Yu Jun-sang), and make him feel fresh... All these things delight me even as they catch me off-guard since the first few movies of yours I saw repeatedly drove me to fits of rage.

Was Song Seon-mi as good in Woman on the Beach as she is here playing a fawning cineaste? Was Kim Ee-seong as natural in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well as he is here playing an embittered actor? In short, the pleasure I'm getting from your films now makes me doubt my assessments before. Should I retract the savage comments I made on your other flicks? Maybe Night and Day isn't a piece of crap. Maybe your short "Lost in the Mountains" isn't half-baked.

I'll have to go back to those and re-watch them some time. For now, I'll just recommend The Day He Arrives, your flawless, black-and-white meditation on coincidence, love, bromance, loneliness, and the art of creation itself. Well done Director Hong and please, forgive me.

Sincerely,

Drew P.

Woman Is the Future of Man: So Real It Hurts

If asked, I'd say I had a bedgrudging respect for autuer Hong Sang-soo but after re-watching Woman Is the Future of Man, I'm going to let the begrudging part go. Although I may never be able to rally around Night and Day or Woman on the Beach (too many cliches; not enough plot), I actually liked the violently jarring The Day the Pig Fell into the Well and his melancholic The Power of Kangwon Province unreservedly. Woman Is the Future of Man, I downright love. A character portrait of a trio of people, Hong's film makes you cringe and ache so often you may think you've got Tourette's, surfacing as it does the little cruelties we inflict and little pains we experience on a moment-to-moment basis when we're in the thick of it. No one is the hero. No one is the villain. No one is the antihero. Art professor Lee Mun-ho (Yu Ji-tae), budding filmmaker Kim Hyeon-gon (Kim Tae-woo) and the woman they both once loved many years ago, bar manager Park Seon-hwa (Seong Hyeon-a) are three flawed humans trying to get through life, unable to free themselves from the daily treacheries that make survival a small scale war. As such, they're constantly betraying each other and themselves so that eventually the small fortresses that they've built to protect themselves are completely smashed away. Sad? Yes. But electric, too.

You can't really pick out a specific actor as the best one here. Hong has cast astutely right down to the lady across the street from the cafe and the guy in the back of the restaurant where Lee gathers with his students for an ill-fated meal. That said, Yu's professor is a fascinating mixture of bumbling and smooth, Kim's filmmaker can't quite shed the hipster edginess that you pray one day he'll outgrow, and Park conveys a quiet bewilderment as she relives the misguided choices of youth all over again one snowy, sloppy weekend. I'd also like to give a shout out to both composer Jeong Yong-jin for his hauntingly wistful score and to Mary, the black Labrador Retriever, who has so many perfect moments as a background player that you'd award her an Equity card (deluxe edition) if animals got those types of things. In terms of film-watching, 2012 hasn't been a great year for me but Woman Is the Future of Man restores my faith in Korean movies. So thank you, Hong Sang-soo, and sorry about any slights I made to your work in the past. Next time, I'm coming in an unreserved fan.

The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well: The Brutal Beginnings of Auteur Hong Sang-soo

It's easy to think you've got an artist figured out after watching a few films. And after seeing Woman on the Beach, Night and Day, and the short Lost in the Mountains among others, I thought I knew what to expect from a Hong Sang-soo movie and quite frankly, I wasn't that impressed. There'd be some heavy drinking, some philosophical talking and some unsatisfactory sex, as men used clingy women and disappointed women griped. Even in The Power of Kangwon Province, the movie of his I probably like the best, the same elements remained.

But summing up a career based on your acquaintanceship with a handful of works is a big mistake. Imagine judging Woody Allen on Celebrity, Cassandra's Dream, and September or assessing Bernardo Bertolucci strictly on Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers. Big mistake! Which is another way of saying that I may have written off Hong Sang-soo a little too soon.

His feature debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, isn't a great movie but it's a pretty interesting one. And yes, you still have the drinking, the abusing, and the longing but with this particular flick all of that's heightened quite a bit. The arrogant artist -- no stranger to Hong's ouevre -- is a super jerk here. If this is Hong's stand-in, he started his career a lot less sympathetic to his type. A failed writer with a real sense of entitlement and a persecution complex, Hyo-sub (Kim Eui-sung) is a cantankerous diva who picks fights with a girlfriend he doesn't like (Cho Eun-sook), a married woman he claims to love (Lee Eun-kyeong), and all his drinking buddies, including one played by Song Kang-ho in his big screen debut!

This time around, the bickering doesn't culminate in a shouting match. Indeed, what distinguishes The Day a Pig Fell in the Well from other Hong movies is that it's meaner and nastier to start and bloodier and more bewildering at the end. It's also infinitely more enigmatic. The final sequence of the movie flashes back and forward in time, both real and imagined. Whether the brutal realities depicted in those jarring sequences are reflecting internal or external states doesn't matter. Hong's first drama comes at you with both fists flying and you're likely to feel stunned and bruised and even a bit disoriented by the time the credits roll. It's not a knockout but it does pack a wallop.

Visitors: When a Filmmaker Works in Charcoal, This Is What Happens

The three films in Visitors are best described as discarded sketches. By which I mean, they come across as both unfinished and unwanted. The first, Japanese director Naomi Kawase's "Koma" definitely feels as though she's testing out ideas for a bigger film, more than making an actual short movie. Characters are underdeveloped, and the story -- about a young man who comes to pay his respects to his grandfather's former employer only to find himself seduced by a crazy woman who may be misinterpreting him as her spirit bridegroom -- is skeletal and would require more fleshing out to be compelling. Watching "Koma," you definitely pick up on Kawase's background as a documentarian, what with its stories within stories, and its personalization of history, even its use of nature photography as segue. But what is she documenting exactly? An aborted creative process? Dunno.

Next up: Hong Sang-soo's "Lost in the Mountains." It's the most successful of the bunch but it's also the most disappointing because it seems to end halfway. Hong, on familiar ground to be sure, relates the woes of a young writer (Jeong Yu-mi) who keeps plotting her own disappointments: first by popping in on her best friend unexpectedly, then by calling up the married professor (Moon Seong-geun) with whom she had an affair, and then by sleeping with her humpy ex-boyfriend (Lee Seon-gyun) whose career has outstripped her own. A chance encounter involving all four has her tossing aside a coffee cup belligerently and driving away but you feel that the story is really only beginning. This is Act I. Where is Act II? Come to think of it, don't most movies have three acts? I think so!

The final entry is "Butterflies Have No Memories" by Lav Diaz. It's hard to believe that Diaz, like his counterparts here, couldn't find better actors ("stilted" would be kind) or a better cinematographer ("murky" would be generous) or a composer to add some drama where little is found but even if he had, no supporting talent could've rescued this script which is really a second draft. "Butterflies..." might be too short to qualify as a feature film but even so it takes a good third of the movie to even introduce the plot. Quasi-political, the central action concerns some poor guys who decide to don conquistador masks and kidnap their better-off Canadian cousin as a way to make money. This is an instance where you wish Diaz had been invited to a writer's lab at Sundance to refine his tale of the downtrodden losers out to make a quick dime. Was his international application rejected? Who knows?

I think what frustrates me most about Visitors, though, is that both Diaz and Kawase -- Kawase especially -- have chalked up some serious awards yet as an introduction to their work Visitors left me feeling that maybe the awards were misprized. If a short anthology is designed to give a quick taste of a few artists, then Visitors has left me looking for a meal elsewhere. May I see another menu?

The Power of Kangwon Province: Rejection Involves a Loss of Color

Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province is two pretty good movies in one. The first concerns a recent high school graduate (Oh Yun-hong) who joins two friends for a short, frankly miserable vacation at a beachfront tourist trap, where she has a botched romance with a married local cop (Kim Yoosuk). The second half-a-movie focuses on a struggling professor (Baek Jong-hak) with whom the young woman recently had an affair and who happens to be simultaneously taking a much more decadent trip to the same subpar resort. Although the two narratives tie together quite nicely come the final scenes, all of The Power of Kangwon Province feels so infected with melacholia that even tangential asides never feel that disconnected. Mood is everything here. A background story about a man who may have pushed his wife off a cliff only heightens the pervading sense that love is disappointing at best, fatal at worst. As someone who has found Hong's later efforts (Woman on the Beach, Night and Day) to be affected dreck, The Power of Kangwon Province proved unexpectedly moving. This flick has an earnest directness that makes its washed out palette feel like an honest manifestation of the colorlessness of the heart's despair.

Woman on the Beach: Writing What You Know When You Know Nothing

Writer's block is a drag. But when the condition becomes the inspiration for a movie, like it does in Hong Sang-soo's arty Woman on the Beach, audiences tend to suffer right alongside the struggling screenwriter. Admittedly, the case depicted here isn't a particularly crippling or painful one: Hong's stand-in (Kim Seung-woo) is able to work through his creative paralysis in less than a week thanks to some trusty tools familiar to many artists (and moviegoers who frequent biopics of same). How's he do it? Well, he betrays his close-friend/producer (an underutilized Kim Tae-woo) by sleeping with his girlfriend (Go Hyun-jung) then betrays his new girlfriend by seducing a lonely divorcee (Song Seon-mi). Blame it on the soju! As portraits of womanizing artists go, Woman on the Beach is fairly tame stuff because the creative cad at its center neither ruins anyone's life nor exhibits self-destructive behavior on a grand scale. He just makes the lives of those around him a little messy and his own life, a little lonely. We can only hope that the art which he produces by stirring up all that trouble is better than this document of his creative process.

Night and Day: A Cad Abroad (And the Broads Who Love Him)

Somewhere out there is a pamphlet entitled A Beginner's Guide to Existential Filmmaking, Vol. 7: The Paris Edition and somehow director Hong Sang-soo got his hands on a tattered copy. You can tell because his flick Night and Day follows many of the rules therein. To wit: #3 Your protagonist should be a middle-aged man (Kim Yeong-ho) who smokes incessantly. #8 He should fall for a nymphette (Park Eun-hye) whose feet he glimpses poking out from under the sheets. #56 He should also have a wife, a mistress, an ex-girlfriend and a random woman to reject. #114 Scenes should end abruptly, right before something big is going to be said ("What is painting?") or done ("Make love to me!"). Hong's a competent filmmaker so Night and Day is never boring but like a skillful kiss given by a man with bad breath, it's not particularly satisfying either. That disappointing kiss is actually a good analogy too because there's no passion behind Night and Day either. More than anything else, the movie feels like an intellectual exercise in which the director explores ideas like deception, desire, and displacement, minus the deeper anxieties. There's ennui but no poignancy, disillusionment but no real grief.