![]() The similarity has been noted since the early days of Hong’s career, but it feels especially accurate now, with his newfound interest in religion, a theme common to Rohmer’s work. Hong uncomfortably and faithfully renders relationships that carry history-it’s this astuteness that has earned him many a comparison to the French New Wave director Éric Rohmer. Of course, the film is not explicitly-or even accurately-about Hong and Kim, but the cathartic yelling between two lovers feels therapeutic. Hong plays with our expectations, but instead gives us the fantasy of that confrontation, saying everything you ever wanted to say to an ex-lover. In a soju-fueled explosion, Young-hee screams back, “Why make it about someone you loved? Trying to lessen your torment?” The director responds, “I need to cast off my regrets.” At the film’s conclusion, Young-hee wakes up on the beach, and no resolution has been met-the entire argument happened in a dream. By the end of the film, the two are reunited, and the director tells her he’s making a film about a person he loved. Similarly, in Hong’s 2017 On the Beach at Night Alone, Kim plays Young-hee, an out-of-work actress still spiraling from an affair with a filmmaker. This hotel, a hideout of sorts for both the poet and the woman, feels removed from the real world simultaneously, it feels removed from the real-life drama that has hampered Hong and Kim’s artistic partnership. Through these orbiting parties, Hong plots comedic run-ins and mistimings to look back on life from a more ruminative, even existential perspective. It is about two different, unrelated parties staying at a hotel-one, an aging poet, whose two adult sons visit him and the second, a heartbroken woman, whose friend comes to comfort her. The film marks a new point of maturity and eschews the kind of biographical subtext that has fanned the flames of Hong and Kim’s affair. In fact, for the first time her love interest (or assumed love interest) does not appear on the screen. Hong’s recent film Hotel by the River employs many of the aforementioned elements, but without pitting Kim against another slurring lover. In many of them, Kim’s professional life becomes threatened because of her love life, too. ![]() In most of them, Kim becomes the center of an awkward romantic situation-by drunken pursuit or misjudgment. Since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, Kim has starred in every single Hong film (a total of six films in less than four years), with the exception of 2016’s Yourself and Yours. Kim Min-hee and Hong Sang-soo at the Berlin Film Festival, 2019. What’s more, Hong seemed to be confessing his infidelity over and over again through his films. Affairs-and public knowledge of them-may be more commonplace in Hollywood, but adultery was illegal in South Korea until 2015, an exacerbating factor in this real-life drama. Hong’s wife was reluctant to divorce him, and websites even published alleged text exchanges between the two women. In 2016, the filmmaker, then 55, was embroiled in a very public scandal over an extramarital affair with 34-year-old actress Kim Min-hee. His recent rise in recognition in his home country, though, has less to do with critical acclaim and more to do with his personal life. ![]() Hong has never enjoyed huge box-office success-at home or internationally-but he has, in recent years, become a fixture at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Locarno. ![]() His films have been called too talky, too heady, maddingly recursive, and confusing-especially since many are rendered dreamlike by time jumps, narrative shifts, and deus ex machina-but Hong’s catalog reflects that of a filmmaker working through his ideas: of love and all the regrets, what if’s, and do-overs that come with it. Shot using long takes and zooms that may seem innocuous or lazy, his cinematography reflects the wandering eyes of his characters and Hong’s own attention to detail. Since debuting in 1996, Hong has used his films to probe the darker sides of modern romance.
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