Audient Auteurs: Hong Sang-soo

This is the ninth in my 2018 monthly series acquainting myself with acclaimed directors whose work has thus far eluded me.

In my continuing desire to venture outside Eurocentric directors in this series, I've dipped back into the realm of my 2017 monthly series, the ill-defined and problematic Asian Audient. My consciousness of Hong Sang-soo was not sufficiently forefronted in my brain to watch one of his movies for that series, so I'm making up for it with two of them in this one.

I actually started to watch a Hong movie once, which was 2012's In Another Country when it was on Netflix. But it was a total false start for reasons I don't remember. I watched fewer than two minutes before thinking better of the decision and changing course, or more likely, not watching anything that night at all. It was probably that I started too late in the evening, though it could have also been that it was a Saturday night, and I decided something more pulpy and genre-associated was more up my alley that night.

I wasn't aware of Hong as the director when I started watching that one, but I've heard his name mentioned a number of times on the various film podcasts I've listen to ... enough different times on enough different podcasts that he breached that undefinable barrier that causes a person to be considered for a series like this one. The size of his filmography -- 27 directing credits in 22 years -- clinched his inclusion in Audient Auteurs.

I'm not digging back very far in the Korean director's filmography though, as both fims are from the past three years. Which is less than a third of his output from those years. Yeah, the guy is prolific, which made sense to me once I started watching and saw that he uses many of the same actors, with relatively few sets. I can imagine they shot most of these in under two weeks.

What else do I know about Hong? Well, there's one big thing but I'll discuss it in context as I get into discussing the films. The basic bio stuff is as follows. He was born in 1960 and is a comparatively late bloomer as a director, not having directed his first feature until age 35. He was educated both in South Korea and the U.S., where he attended California College of Arts and Crafts and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films have never been commercially successful as they have always dealt realistically with low-key relationships between regular human beings, but they have consistently garnered critical acclaim and awards at film festivals.

Shall we dig in?

Right Now, Wrong Then (2015)

This was the film I thought I most needed to see from Hong's filmography, as it got a lot of chatter a few years back -- the chatter was probably in 2016 as we typically get foreign films for our consumption a year after their release in their country of origin. I didn't remember what I'd heard about it at the time, but the title seemed to suggest there might have been something high concept about it.

As it turns out, Right Now, Wrong Then is indeed a high-concept film, but delivered in a low-concept package. I'll explain.

The film documents a chance meeting between a film director and a young woman, who strike up a conversation in a temple of some sort, though one that people visit casually as tourists, not for religious reasons. They decide to get a cup of coffee and end up ambling around and spending the day together, during which they seem like they might be falling in love. He's from out of town, and is present for a screening of his film, at which he will also speak.

The setup might put someone in mind of a film like Lost in Translation, only unlike Sofia Coppola, Hong doesn't do anything to inflate the romanticism of the scenario. In fact, certain proclamations of sentiment strike the viewer as quite sudden, given that the film has not been using the typical filmmaking techniques to indicate growing attraction -- profound exchanges of intimacies, close-ups, an inadvertent touch. No, this is proceeding forward in comparatively mundane ways.

As in Translation, it turns out the man is married, though only the man in this case. As some alcohol enters into the proceedings in the evening at a dinner thrown by some of her friends, things start to go bad, but again in comparatively low-key ways. Like, there's no fight, physical or otherwise, just increasing recriminations over emotional usury and drunken sorrow.

I won't tell you how it turns out because I suppose that's a spoiler, but I will tell you that it's only half the movie. The second half begins where we started the first half, with the director wandering into the temple and spotting the woman. We quickly realize we're about to be subjected to the same series of events again, only with small modifications that change the outcome.

A high-concept setup for a film, you would agree. But what makes the execution low concept is that there's no single moment in their interaction you can point to that causes the day to pivot from one trajectory to another. A Hollywood film of this subject would be obsessed with the idea of a butterfly flapping its wings halfway around the world and the events turning out differently. That Hollywood filmmaker would concentrate on the mechanics of these differences in ways that would be so overt they would hit you over the head. When something went differently, you'd know exactly why it went differently.

That's not Hong. Hong doesn't care why two competing versions of a timeline for a particular random day in history might have gone differently. He recognizes that the difference is largely internal, one of free will. If I watched the two versions side by side, which would be quite a useful exercise if it were feasible, I might actually see a moment where the director chooses one line of inquiry with his companion rather than another, and that subtly changes the effect on her psychology in a way he couldn't have envisioned. But really, these decisions are made in his head, or her head, as maybe she was the one who caused the exchange to go differently. They aren't due to some factor outside their control, like a butterfly in South America.

As much as I sound refreshed by Hong's creative choice in the previous paragraph, initially it kind of annoyed me. There was enough of the narrative traditionalist in me to demand a satisfying explanation for the differences between the two iterations of events. As it went forward, though, I grew to appreciate what he was doing, in part also because it builds toward a very satisfying climax that does restore some of my associations to a film like Lost in Translation. Which is one of my top 50 films of all time.

At this point I need to tell you that thing about Hong I knew before but was waiting to discuss. The lead actress in this film is Kim Min-hee, and only after the film was released did anyone realize how autobiographical the film really was. The fact that it's about a director makes it quite obviously autobiographical on some level, but the fact that it was a director considering an extramarital affair mightn't have been part of that autobiography. Later we would come to realize that not only was that part true also, but the affair Hong had was actually with Kim -- a fact that would be acknowledged during a press conference for the second film I saw, with Kim sitting right next to him.

On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)

So Kim and Hong made the decision to reveal their affair while doing press for On the Beach at Night Alone, which also contextualizes On the Beach at Night Alone, in which she once again appears as a character who had an affair -- past tense this time -- with a prominent director. For a while I thought it might have been the same character, and this was either an actual or functional sequel to Right Now, Wrong Then. But later in the film the director appears, and it's a much older man than the director character in Right Now. The character is not played by Hong himself, but at this point I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been.

It was also at this point that I thought Hong crossed over from curious about his own history and psychology in a way that was aesthetically justifiable to just plain self-indulgent.

Perhaps if he had never admitted his affair with Kim we wouldn't have been so confronted with his obsession with this affair, though if I have my chronologies correct, the first movie was a case of life imitating art, where the second movie was the one engaging with what had actually happened in Hong's real life. I've probably also got a skewed perspective because I am seeing only these two films, which both happen to deal with this, while the other five films he's made during the same period are probably about other things entirely.

Still, I couldn't help having the impression that this guy is openly struggling with his own infidelity and making the rest of us watch it, and adding an extra layer of perversion to it all by making the very actress with whom he had the affair act in a movie that occurred after the end of their affair, about the impact on her character of the end of the affair. And then talking about it with her sitting next to him at the press conference.

I'm not going to do a lot of additional googling to sort out the exact chronology, to what extent Kim was willing participant, and whether they're still in a relationship, which theoretically might make it all less bad (or possibly more, depending on your perspective). I will say that the whole thing strikes me as a wee bit icky. Maybe more than a wee bit.

All of this might not be such a problem if On the Beach at Night Alone were a better film.

I saw it only a few days ago, but I was looking for help from Wikipedia with a plot refresher anyway. Unfortunately, this is all Wikipedia has on the plot:

"Young-hee is a washed up actress who is stressed by a relationship with a married man in Korea. On the beach she wonders: Is he missing me, like I miss him?"

Thanks, that's helpful.

And also, though I'm sure the director had nothing to do with how the plot was characterized on Wikipedia, makes me think even less of Hong's motivations for making the film and his sense of narcissism.

What I can tell you is that the film is divided into two chapters called "1" and "2." Unlike Right Now, Wrong Then, they are of very different lengths (the first about 20 minutes, the second the rest of the running time), and don't seem to have that much to do with each other. In the first one, Kim's character is walking around a city in Europe with another Korean woman. They talk, mentioning the affair with the director, and interact with some Europeans, including buying some books. These scenes were actually in English. In the second chapter, Kim is back in Korea, her traveling companion nowhere to be seen. Here she interacts with other local friends, having meals, and coming into contact with some of the crew for the director's new movie. They in fact discover her lying on the beach in the same town where they are shooting the movie. Ultimately he comes in at the very end.

I just didn't get what the point of the film was, and that's why I wondered if Hong's artistic sensibilities were being hampered by the extent he was staring at his own navel. It kind of lurches around and lurches forward, with Kim spending a fair bit of time staring out at the sea. Most of the conversations with friends are mundane, though she obviously has conflicting feelings about the director, speaking of him in dismissive terms but continuing to kind of pine away for him. (Self-indulgent, I tell you.) The eventual interaction with her ex at dinner near the end of the film does get intense, but not in a satisfying way, since the director had not been previously established as a character. The insertion of him at the end, then the expectation that a useful emotional denouement is going to arise from it, is just more evidence of the way Hong seems deluded about the value of giving us a front row seat to his private life.

I suppose to get a real take on Hong's larger body of work, I need to see a film of his that is not either the direct precursor to or the immediate aftermath of his real-life extramarital affair. Though I must say, I don't feel particularly eager to get to that.

Okay, only two months left of Audient Auteurs. I don't know who I'll finish with, but I've got November all lined up. I haven't seen a single film by the acclaimed documentarian Frederick Wiseman, and Kanopy has just about all his films. So there'll be a bounty of choices that has been largely absent from this series so far -- a Thanksgiving feast worth of choices, you might say.