Hong Sang-soo

IN WATER: waiting for Hong Sang-soo

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Photo caption: Ha Seong-guk, Kim Min-hee and Shin Seok-ho in IN WATER. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

In Hong Sang-soo’s In Water, an actor-director (Shin Seok-ho) is plunging his savings into a short film that he is directing. He rents a three-bedroom house on the seaside for a week to house himself, an actress (Kim Min-hee) that he’s worked with before and a cinematographer (Ha Seong-guk) that he and the actress don’t know. The problem is that the director still doesn’t know what his film will be about.

The three walk along the shore and eat take-out food, while the director keeps delaying the shoot, stalling until his has an idea. The actress and the cinematographer, with more patience than the audience, are trying to figure out what’s going on. Finally, the director has a mundane encounter with a local that he replicates in his film, and tops it with a quietly dramatic statement about his own artistic malaise. In scenes that portray the director’s indecision, Hong Sang-soo intentionally blurs the camera (see image below) and plays tinny music.

Kim Min-hee, Ha Seong-guk and Shin Seok-ho in IN WATER. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

Writer-director Hong Sang-soo cranks out little, intimate, clever films like Woody Allen did in his heyday and is kind of his own genre. As he demonstrates in Yourself and Yours, Claire’s Camera, Walk-up and The Woman Who Ran, Hong is a droll observer of human behavior. There’s usually a movie director character and lot of drinking and eating in his films. He checks the boxes here, with meals and snack runs and a shoju binge.

I always enjoy watching Kim Min-hee, she of the riveting performance in The Handmaiden. She’s a huge star in Korea, but she’s in an off-screen relationship with Hong Sang-soo, and she’s been showing up in his little movies.

I’ll watch any Hong-Sang-Soo movie, but I don’t think this one pays off. Even though it’s only 60 minutes long, I can only recommend In Water for hardcore Hong Sang-soo fans. I do recommend that you sample Hong Sang-soo by watching his You, Yourself and Yours, which I tagged as “Buñuel meets Seinfeld”; you can find it titled Yourself and Yours streaming on AppleTV and YouTube.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN: is the payoff worth the slow burn?

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Photo caption: Kim Min-hee and Song Seon-mi in THE WOMAN WHO RAN. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

In The Woman Who Ran, even after a few years of marriage, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) has never been apart from her husband until he takes a business trip; she takes advantage of the opportunity to visit each of three old friends to catch up. In each of the three vignettes, Gam-Hee gets a tour of the friend’s house, sits for a meal and covers much the same ground in conversation. The audience settles in, and gleans a few nuggets about each of the women. It’s pretty low-key until the eruption of a final simmering confrontation.

Writer-director Hong Sang-soo cranks out little, intimate, clever films like Woody Allen did in his heyday and is kind of his own genre. As he demonstrates in Yourself and Yours, Claire’s Camera, Walk-up and The Woman Who Ran, Hong is a droll observer of human behavior. There’s usually a lot of drinking and eating in his films; there’s far less drinking than usual in The Woman Who Ran, but the gals do devour the food.

The acting is first-rate, especially Kim Min-hee, whom we also saw in Hong Sang-soo’s Claire’s Camera, You may remember her riveting performance in The Handmaiden.

I’m such a fan, I’ll watch any Hong-Sang-Soo movie. Even though The Woman Who Ran is only 77 minutes long, I won’t recommend it to a general audience because the payoff is not worth such slow burn. I do recommend that you sample Hong Sang-soo by watching his You, Yourself and Yours, which I tagged as “Buñuel meets Seinfeld”; you can find it as Yourself and Yours on AppleTV and YouTube.

The Woman Who Ran is available to stream from AppleTV and YouTube.

YOURSELF AND YOURS: Buñuel meets Seinfeld

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YOURSELF AND YOURS
YOURSELF AND YOURS
photo courtesy of SFFILM

The absurdism of Luis Buñuel meets the social awkwardness of Seinfeld in Hong Sang-soo’s Koran comedy Yourself and Yours.

In Yourself and Yours, Minjung (Lee You-young) dumps her boyfriend (Kim Joo-hyuck) after he objects to her heavy drinking (“I’ve stopped drinking – now I stop after only five rounds“). Then another man thinks that he meets Minjung, but she claims that she is Minjung’s identical twin. We’re not so sure about that. And then she meets ANOTHER man, and her identity remains in question. Her original boyfriend is comically bereft, and he’s on the lookout for her, too.

One character says “You men are all pathetic“, and Minjung proves that point at every opportunity. In a deliberate homage to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, Lee You-young plays the role of Minjung and her multiple doppelgängers (unless they are all really Minjung herself).  There are plenty of LOL moments as Yourself and Yours winds its way full circle to a satisfyingly sly finale.

I saw Yourself and Yours (Dangsinjasingwa dangsinui geot) at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).  In an Only-At-SFFILM moment, I (a Hong Sang-soo newbie) was surrounded in the audience by devoted Hong Sang-soo fans. During its Bay Area virtual run at the Roxie, you can stream Yourself and Yours at Roxie Virtual Cinema.

CLAIRE’S CAMERA: a deadpan human camera observes…

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Min-hee Kim in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Claire’s Camera is the latest nugget from writer-director Hong Sang-soo, that great observer of awkward situations and hard-drinking.  Jeon (Min-hee Kim of The Handmaiden) is a film company assistant who ia traveled to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of a Korean film.  It turns out that the film company executive has had a long-term relationship with the movie’s director, and she immediately fires Jeon when she learns of Jeon’s fling with the director.  With several days sill to go before her return flight, Jeon wanders around Cannes. Jeon meets the French schoolteacher and amateur photographer Claire (Isabelle Huppert) and they hang out.  Coincidentally, Claire also meets the director.  Most of the dialogue is in English, the common language of the French and Korean characters – and the earnestly imperfect English-speaking supplies some of the film’s humor.

Not only does Claire have a camera, she IS the camera through which we observe the foibles of the other characters.  Jeon is breathtakingly clueless (or in denial) about the reason for her dismissal.  The director, as many Hong Sang-soo characters, has an enthusiastic relationship with alcohol.  It’s all dryly funny, although the director and the executive redefine their relationship in a powerfully realistic scene.

This is an especially fine performance by Min-hee Kim.  She pulled off some deadpan humor in The Handmaiden, a film more thought of for its eroticism and mystery.  Here, she’s often just wandering around in reflection and making small talk.  But Kim is just so watchable, she keeps the audience’s interest keen.

Claire’s Camera is not as surreal as last year’s Hong Sang-soo entry, Yourself and Yours, but just as observational and droll.  I saw Claire’s Camera at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where Hong Sang-soo has a cult following and always appreciative audiences.  It’s now playing at the 4 Star in San Francisco.

Min-hee Kim and Isabelle Huppert in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

SFFILM: YOURSELF AND YOURS

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YOURSELF AND YOURS
YOURSELF AND YOURS
photo courtesy of SFFILM

The absurdism of Luis Buñuel meets the social awkwardness of Seinfeld in Hong Sang-soo’s Koran comedy Yourself and Yours. I just saw Yourself and Yours (Dangsinjasingwa dangsinui geot) at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival).  In an Only-At-SFFILM moment, I (a Hong Sang-soo newbie) was surrounded in the audience by devoted Hong Sang-soo fans.

In Yourself and Yours, Minjung (Lee You-young) dumps her boyfriend (Kim Joo-hyuck) after he objects to her heavy drinking (“I’ve stopped drinking – now I only stop after five rounds”). Then another man thinks that he meets Minjung, but she claims that she is Minjung’s identical twin. We’re not so sure about that. And then she meets ANOTHER man, and her identity remains in question. Her original boyfriend is comically bereft, and he’s on the lookout for her, too.

One character says “You men are all pathetic”, and Minjung proves that point at every opportunity. In a deliberate homage to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, Lee You-young plays the role of Minjung and her multiple doppelgängers (unless they are all really Minjung herself).  There are plenty of LOL moments as Yourself and Yours winds its way full circle to a satisfyingly sly finale.