Directed by Hong Sangsoo
South Korea | 2014 | 67 mins | English (mostly) and Korean w/English subtitles
Source: Grasshopper Films
Second in our retrospective series of South Korean filmmaker Hong. Read intro to series below trailer.
Ticket link coming soon.
Shot in the narrow alleys, petite cafes and beautiful hanok inns of Seoul’s historic Jong-ro district, a favorite Hong location, the film is a puzzle for us to make sense of. Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology… and so must we. And on another layer: a central thread of the film is communication and conversations: Nearly every single scene is framed around a conversation in English, spoken by non-native speakers who therefore use it in a way that is fundamentally different from how they use their native tongues.
“Hong achieves a complexity akin to the grand historical meditations of Alain Resnais; steering clear of explicit politics, he conjures revealing attitudes through reverberant—and often comical—details.” ~Richard Brody
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Hong Sang-soo is among the most prolific of modern filmmakers. In the past decade he’s written and directed 15 features — including three in 2017 alone. He’s also among the 21st century’s most distinctive cinematic stylists. His ironic narratives find subtle comedy in the absurdity of social constructs and understated drama in the messy complexity of romantic relationships.
Hong has been called “the Korean Woody Allen,” but Eric Rohmer or Jean Eustache might be more apt comparisons. Like those French auteurs, Hong focuses on the minutiae of everyday life and is fond of lengthy, cerebral dialogue scenes. A quintessential Hong scene is filmed in a single shot, with irregularly timed pans and digital zooms that underline shifts in a dinner conversation. As copious amounts of soju are consumed, mundane talk turns serious then awkward, finally giving way to an unexpected emotional epiphany.
Hong’s oeuvre is remarkably consistent, with similar themes explored across multiple films featuring a recurring stock company of actors. Even within individual films he’s fond of narrative doubling, with the same events playing out in different permutations. ~ Luke Baynes, VTIFF programming committee
YOURSELF AND YOURS (2016): Opening June 5
HILL OF FREEDOM (2014): Opening June 12
WOMAN ON THE BEACH (2006): Opening June 19