Tag: Hong Sang-soo

A Traveler’s Needs (Yeohaengjaui pilyo)

Posted on by victorfraga

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I have sorely missed the films of Hong Sang-soo: it’s been nearly three months since he last premiered a movie in a European film festival. In A Traveller’s Needs, he teams up with his regular partner Isabelle Huppert in order to create a highly conversation, lighthearted and pleasant cinema experience. His language and his aesthetics have barely changed. And they continue to work. If it ain’t broken, why fix it?

In this 90-minute drama entirely set in the suburbs of some unnamed Korean city, Iris (Huppert) is a French teacher and a lodger. She insists that her name is pronounced “Iris” instead of the anglicised “AHYris”, perhaps in order to retain her Francophone identity. She’s silly, honest and extremely easygoing – a very attractive combination. Her candid persona allows her to bond effortlessly with her Korean students. They are prepared to share secrets of their lives and cry in front of her. More than a language teacher, she’s an informal therapist. After all, people need to talk, be that in Korean, French or English (the language that she uses to communicate more extensively). She confesses to one of her students that she has no qualifications and barely any experience, having devised the strange teaching methods herself a few months earlier (she uses indexing cards instead of books). The revelation leaves the learner baffled, but this doesn’t prevent Iris from asking for more Makgeolli (a local alcoholic drink), in one of the film’s funniest scenes.

Iris’s landlord is a young man called Inguk (Ha Seongguk). They met casually in the park. One day, Inguk’s mother visits him and finds out about the tenant. She freaks out, lest her son is either having an affair with a much older woman, or is looking for a motherly replacement. The real nature of their relationship is never entirely clear. Perhaps Inguk is indeed in love, but the laid-back and spontaneous Iris seems more interested in going for walks in the park and drinking copious amounts of Makgeolli (Gently and continuous boozing is also a common thread in Sang-soo’s work). The four main characters have a unifying factor: they can play a musical instrumental each, and just as badly. Her students play the piano and the guitar, Inguk plays the keyboard, and iris plays the harmonica. It is impossible not to laugh as our protagonists tragically display their musical skills (or rather lack thereof).

This is a movie about impromptu, unlikely, fugitive and yet very genuine bonds between people of very different backgrounds. The seductive Iris is unabashed by her foreign nationality; in fact she uses it as an asset.

The 63-year-old Korean filmmaker is the king of casual awkwardness. His characters remain as ordinary and the conversations as banal as ever. The director finds humour in the micro-reactions (of surprise, confusion, indignation, affection, etc), and the very brief moments of silence. The performances ooze spontaneity, a result that can only be achieved through organic scripting. There are no big twists and no violence (neither physical nor psychological). All characters are multidimensional and profoundly human, and perhaps precisely for that reason extremely endearing. This sense of improvisation is in line with the film’s formal austerity. The camera hardly moves, except for a few clunky zoom movements. It feels almost like a low-budget documentary. Except of course, it isn’t: the characters are played by professional actors, and there is noticeable foley.

A Traveler’s Needs demonstrates that small talk is therapy, and that the content of the conversation is far less important than the affection between the characters. In a way, this also extends to the director and his creations. Watching the movies of Hong Sang-soo is also therapeutic, regardless of the plot. It is our love for the characters that prevails.

From the Official Competition of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.

Walk Up

Posted on by victorfraga

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The latest feature by one of South Korea’s (and perhaps the world’s) most prolific filmmakers is a highly confessional and seemingly autobiographical piece of drama. Well-know Korean filmmaker Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his art student daughter encounter the older, friendly and deeply curious Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young) at the entrance of the recently renovate building of which she’s the landlady. The three enjoy a meal together, where the young woman reveals her interior design ambitions, while the director shares his most intimate secrets and frustrations. Byung-soo is obviously’s Sang-soo’s very own proxy.

Byung-soo constantly complains about the nature of the film industry. He claims that it is ruled by greedy investors with little interest in the artistic merit of the films. Cinema costs a lot of money, and the contents of a movie have to be arduously negotiated both before and after filming. He also questions the point of film festivals, a comment which evokes laughter from the crowds. There is a constant struggle between money and creative freedom.The middle-aged director confesses that he longs for a break. Perhaps two years without making a movie. Is this a hint that Sang-soo might be about to start a respite? Fortunately for us, Byung-soo soon changes his mind. He now wants to make no less than the 12 films on the Jeju Island, Korea’s largest and highly mystical island.

His daughter claims to be a huge fan of her father, yet is unable to name her favourite film, even after her father presses her for an answer. She enjoys the fact that his movies are highly conversational and realistic. This is naturally a reference to Sang-soo’s extensive portfolio and highly convivial filming style, reminiscent of Nouvelle Vague auteur Eric Rohmer. I myself have seen about 10 films by Hong Sang-soo, I have enjoyed most of them, yet I can barely remember their titles let alone the storyline.

The focus of Walk Up is on spontaneous conversation and commensality. About 70% of the film takes place around the dinner table. The camera remains static and non-intrusive, allowing most of the conversation to flow freely and without inhibitions. I doubt that these interactions are scripted. Characters drink a copious amount of wine, eat meat and smoke cigarettes as they share anecdotes, banal pearls of wisdoms, but also their most sincere emotions. There is no conflict. The food and the drinks are lighthearted and easily digestible, much like the film per se. Watching a Hong Sang-soo film is much much like having dinner out with a group of friends: it’s mostly relaxed and enjoyable, yet you will barely remember the details the following day (particularly if the meal was washed down with the same amount of alcohol as in the film).

Conspicuous in her absence is Sang-soo long-time lover and muse Kim Minm-hee, who has starred in nearly all of the director’s recent films. Instead, she appears as production director. She sat beside the director during the film screening at the impressive Kursaal, San Sebastian’s largest and most prestigious movie theatre.

Walk Up is showing in the Official Competition of the 70th San Sebastian International Film Festival/ Donostia Zinemaldia. Sang-soo is accustomed to winning top prizes at a-list film festivals across Europe, and it wouldn’t be surprise if he snatched an award or two.

The Woman Who Ran (Domnahchin Yeoja)

Posted on by victorfraga

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Watching the latest Hong Sang-soo’s movie is like drinking a glass of white wine with a friendly stranger. It’s a light-hearted and thoroughly enjoyable experience, but you will hardly remember the content of the conversation a couple of days later. Such is the case with his 24th feature The Woman Who Ran.

Gamhee (played by Sang-soo’s diva and partner Kim Min-hee) has spent every single day of the past five years with her husband because he believes that “that’s what people in love do”. He’s now away on a business trip, and so Gamhee takes the opportunity to mingle with three female friends, and to discuss the banalities, the trivialities of her relationship, of causal love, of eating animals and feeding robber cats. One of her friends is now in a relationship with one of Gamhee’s former lover, a talkative man who does not demand that his partner is constantly attached to him (in stark contrast to Gamhee’s clingy spouse).

Food is a central character, and much of the action takes place on a dinner table (a common feature not just in Sang-soon’s prolific cinema, but also in South Korean culture as a whole). Character share their casual stories and off-the-cuff life lessons and advice while they eat apples and sip white wine. The extensive conversations are simple and mundane on the surface, yet dotted with subtle humour and peculiar pearls of wisdom. An interaction with an angry neighbour who does not like feral cats being fed by humans is particularly amusing.

Sang-soo’s movies are so similar that it’s often difficult to describe and rate them. The minimalism is pervasive: the camera hardly moves, except for a few zooms and horizontal pans, the settings are ordinary, there’s no artwork and the music score consists of no more than a few piano notes. Characters are nonchalant, the acting is very plain, and precisely for those reasons the story is very convincing. This is cinema reduced to its bare essentials.

You are far more likely to enjoy and engage with the latest Hong Sang-see movie if your mind is clear and your heart wide open. Otherwise they can be a excruciatingly tedious experience. How else would you find passion and wit in a conversation about chickens, looking at a nondescript knoll, or observing your friend shun a one-night-stand via the interphone? Just take a chair, sit back and join Gamhee and her friends in the kitchen for a relaxed 77 minutes.

The Woman Who Ran showed in Competition at the 70th Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. Hong Sang-soo is a regular at the Berlinale, Cannes and film festivals across Europe. It’s out in selected cinemas and Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 11th. It’s on Mubi on Sunday, December 20th.

Grass

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Black and white. The weather is pleasant. In a Seoul backstreet a young woman stops to admire flowers and other vegetation in plant pots, just as the camera will do at the film’s close. Inside a cafe where the owner (who we never see) plays recordings of classical music, she sits and chats to a young man. In the corner, a woman (Kim Min-hee) is typing at her laptop. In the cafe, as people come and stay or go, she muses about them and writes. But when asked, she denies that she’s a writer. It’s a sort of diary. For herself, not for anyone else to read.

A number of the customers are actors or writers – one guy used to work for a theatre troupe but had a bust up with the guy who ran it and quit. He’s now reduced to asking people if they have somewhere he could live. Another guy has written a couple of screenplays, but swears that his first love is really acting and that, in time, acting is something he’ll get back to doing.

One way or another, a lot of the conversations get on to the subject of personal relationships and it’s pretty obvious there are some huge chasms between male and female. This applies whether its the woman at the start who admits to a man she’s going on holidiy, not with someone he knows, and therefore (as he works out) with someone he doesn’t. Or whether it’s the very much in love couple who chat with the laptop PC lady from the corner about how they’re thinking about getting married, At which Kim Min-hee suggests there are all manner of difficulties with this if the couple don’t really know each other beforehand – and that they need to be thoroughly honest with one another if the marriage is not going to fail.

There’s a break to these sequences in the middle where one woman goes up and down the stairs, getting fast and faster, as she tries to clear her head and make up her mind about something.

The film is pleasant and enjoyable enough to watch, made with a great deal of improvisation, but in the end this is one of Hong Sangsoo’s slightest works. You might get a great deal from it. Or you might not and wonder instead why you didn’t spend your time hanging out at a cafe listening to people and watching the world go by for yourself.

Grass plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Tuesday, November 5th, 21.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 20.45, FilmHouse, Edinburgh – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.00, Watershed, Bristol – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 17.30, Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow – book here.

On the Beach at Night Alone (Bamui Haebyun-Eoseo Honja)

Posted on by victorfraga

A film critic once famously said that seeing an Eric Rohmer movie was the equivalent to “watching paint dry”. Now Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has excelled the late French director and created a film with a pace even more painful and sluggish. This is a hitherto unthinkable achievement. On the Beach at Night Alone is equivalent to watching paint fade.

Younghee (Kim Min-hee) is a famous actress who travels to Hamburg to meet a friend. They walk through wintry parks and riverbanks reflecting about the meaning of love, men, ageing and so on. The beautiful artist, who is probably in her 30s, reveals that she has recently ended an affair with a married man. Back in South Korea, Young-hee meets up with some old friends in the coastal town of Gangneung. They engage in prolongued conversations about more or less the same platitudes.

At less than 100 minutes, On the Beach at Night Alone isn’t a particularly long film. But the dialogues are so banal, that the film becomes insufferable after just 30 minutes or so. Similarly to Rohmer, the movie is almost entirely conversational and much of the “action” takes place in parks or around the dinner table. The beach in the film title refers to the place where Younghee goes to relax and meditate. She sits in front of the sea staring at the horizon for long periods of time. It’s almost as if she was waiting for a magic sign from the waters, just like in Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986). Unsurprisingly, nothing ever happens.

What might surprise you is that, in reality, I like Eric Rohmer’s movies a lot. I have seen nearly every one of them. On the other hand, On the Beach at Night Alone was an excruciating experience. I have some possible explanations for the disconnect:

Perhaps the problem is a strange camera zoom-in replicated in almost every sequence of the movie. Maybe it’s the constant repetition of Franz Schubert’s Cello Quintet in an apparent attempt to emphasise solitude and inwardness. Despite liking Schubert, the tune is mercilessly piercing my brain right now as I write this. Or it could be the triviality of the girly chit-chat and petit-bourgeois themes: “which girl is the prettiest?”, “am I too old?”, and so on. Or maybe I’m just too Western in order to understand Korean sensibility?

Whatever the answer, I think you may have gathered by now that neither I enjoyed and nor would I recommend this film to anyone. Unless you enjoy watching paint fade.

On the Beach at Night Alone showed in February as part of the Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The film is showing as part of the 61st BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 5th and 15th.

It is worthwhile noting that the film was, at least in part, a response to the rumours that the director was having an extra-marital affair. In March, he confessed that he is dating the lead actress.

A few months later, after watching a couple more films by the Korean director, Victor Fraga changed has had a change of heart about Hong Sang-soo. Click here in order to find out what he thinks about Hong Sang-soo now!