MIFF Session #8: YOURSELF AND YOURS

A young man is chatting to a friend and learns that his partner has been going out, drinking too much and causing scenes. He finds it hard to credit but it sticks with him.

In the next scene a middle aged man stops by a cafe to get a iced Americano and is locked by the sight of a woman he knows at the shady end of the cafe. He approaches her familiarly but she claims not to recognise him, eventually conceding that he must have mistaken her for her twin sister. Persisting through the awkwardness the man suggests a drink and is not turned down.

Then we see the woman getting into bed. Her partner wakes up and we see that he is the man from the first scene. The gossip about her is borne out but she denies it. Angered, he breaches their relationship by accusing her of lying. She leaves. He implodes.

Hong Sang Soo's mastery of conversation as battle takes a leaf out of Bunuel territory here as shades of That Obscure Object of Desire wafts in like a breeze. It's not a direct lift but if you persist in working out if the female lead is lying, amnesiac or really either one of a pair of twins you will get no joy from this piece. It's a film you just need to flow with. If it were a neo-noir and she its femme fatale that advice would sound like wank supreme but this is Hong Sang Soo and he is taking us again into the realm of the contemporary comedy of manners. Come to think of it, another reference point here is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind done to similar effect but none of the effects.

I was also about to write that this is a departure for the writer/director but really he has done little but depart from starting position with each new entry, particularly with last year's self-rebooting Right Now, Wrong Then and this year's On a Beach Alone at Night. It makes me think that with such a lean style this filmmaker achieves something that those in similar territories like Whit Stillman have not, extended their range and remained themselves. It failed the likes of Hal Hartley but I think we're looking at sterner stuff.

MIFF Session #6: ON A BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE

Young Hee is a beautiful young Korean film star whose recent affair with a married man has sent her into voluntary exile to Europe. She discusses this with her dowdy companion while they stroll the parks and mise en scene of Hamburg. While enjoying the beach one evening she is carried away by what appears to be a stalker.

Later, she appears in a provincial Korean cafe talking to the man she'd loved but it is distant. She appears in another small scale cafe and engages with another man who unsuccessfully conceals his own marital status. Later she, he and the other guy and two female partners share dinner and Korean wine and Young Hee goes postal with the manners

A quartet of the above spends time at a seaside resort as a very dodgy window cleaner videobombs their chitchat. This is a very very funny scene,

Later, she is woken while sleeping on the beach by a member of a film scouting crew who takes her into his company for another edge-burning dinner chat.

This is a Hong San Soo film. It is mostly made of conversation (not dialogue, mind you, this is a studiously careful distinction) and interpersonal dynamics. I know I seem to have taken the piss here but what I am describing is a purely lovely moment of cinema. Stanley Kubrick characterised successful films as being constructed of six insubmersible units, blocks of human interaction that defied further breakdown. Hong Sang Soo makes Kubrickian comedies of manners. He doesn't care who notices. He doesn't care who cares. He just does it and he does it repeatedly and teaches any who will look that good films can come of little more than knowing and loving the material.

I love Hong Sang Soo's films despite the festival darling status he has attained. I love them because they are themselves. I haven't been able to say the same of any filmmaker's work since INLAND EMPIRE and that, my friends, makes me happy.