I don’t tend to write about filmmakers in terms of career trajectories—partly because that usually takes more historical digging than I’m willing to do, partly because it can sometimes be used as a substitute for useful critical observation. Still, taking a step back and surveying a career in terms of “periods” can be instructive, and in thinking about Hong Sang-soo’s recent films, I’ve often returned to this insightful paragraph by Dan Sallitt on late Hawks:
There’s always room for debate about the transitional points in artistic careers, but Hawks is one of the rare filmmakers whose late period seems to commence almost officially. Some filmmakers experience a success—on whatever terms they define success—that ratifies their approach in their own eyes, gives them permission to be more fully themselves. After such a success, the filmmakers proceed to projects that are, on the surface, very like the previous successful projects—but, beneath the superficial resemblances, the new films are more self-enclosed, more self-consciously stamped with the filmmakers’ personalities, less of a compromise between movie-movies and personal quirk. Antonioni had such a success with L’Avventura, and his next film, La Notte, treats similar thematic material but does not devote the same energy to preparing or seducing the audience, as if a contract with the Antonioni viewer had been established. Alan Rudolph pivoted similarly on the success of Choose Me, segueing to the more abstract authorial voice of Trouble in Mind.
The turning point for Hawks is of course Rio Bravo (1959). In the case of Hong Sang-soo, it’s become increasingly clear to me that the pivot is Right Now, Wrong Then (2015). Apart from its Golden Leopard win, Right Now, Wrong Then was a de facto statement of principles. If one had previously been hesitant to call Hong’s work “metaphysical,” this film left one with few other options. Talk of “infinite worlds possible” in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996) would have been incomprehensible; around Night and Day (2008) it would have been simply eccentric. With The Day He Arrives (2011) such talk would have been more plausible—but with Right Now, Wrong Then it seemed entirely reasonable. At the very least, Hong felt confident enough to explain his story concept in those terms:
Just look at these two circles in the drawing as two independent worlds. If you believe there’s a clear reason for these two worlds to exist, once you find a clear meaning between them, then these worlds themselves disappear. Once we make clear sense out of these two worlds, they are just used up. It happens that it’s not easy to give them a clear meaning. So all the questions are kept alive if there’s an infinite possibility of worlds. It’s like a permanent reverberation.
In Hill of Freedom (2014), Ryô Kase’s character remarks that our usual conception of time as an empirical succession of nows—one clock-tick after another—is unreal. And without further context, one might rightly hesitate to ascribe this belief to Hong. But in presenting us with two simultaneous, incompossible presents in Right Now, Wrong Then, Hong affirmed at least the notion that there might be more to reality than this conception of clock-time. More than most directors, Hong is conscious about teaching viewers how to watch his films, and I’d argue that his structural gamesmanship is geared toward getting us away from this conventional view of time. In this regard, Right Now, Wrong Then is arguably his most explicit statement of principles. If all his films teach us how to watch them, Right Now, Wrong Then seemed to come with its own instruction manual.
Which is maybe why the films that followed seemed to throw it out. For in a sense, Right Now, Wrong Then presented Hong with two major discoveries, which he no longer felt the need to spell out each time. The first was that the film’s metaphysical picture of two independent worlds still had one glaring problem: the presentation of one world still had to precede or follow another. By having the happier ending come second, the film thereby affirms it, becoming optimistic rather than pessimistic, comic rather than tragic. Changing the order would change the outcome, but the problem of ordering alternatives would remain. It seems no coincidence that Hong subsequently abandoned the one-two structures he’d previously favoured, whether the bifurcation of The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) or the perspectival alternations of HaHaHa (2010). The Woman Who Ran (2020) and Introduction (2021) are both triptychs, and if they suggest anything, it’s that a diptych structure lends itself too easily to a point-counterpoint effect. To conceive of one image in opposition to another is, after all, merely to confirm a certain dependence.
The second, arguably more significant finding was that, given the success of Right Now, Wrong Then, Hong no longer needed to signpost his structural gamesmanship so explicitly. The title cards which divide Right Now, Wrong Then, the “1”/“2” labels in Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000), the shuffled letters of Hill of Freedom: such explicit markers could be dispensed with. The contract with the viewer having been established in 2015, a waiver was no longer required each time. Henceforth, a regular, unassuming cut would be enough to rupture the film in the way that those explicit story markers previously did. Henceforth, any element or transition could potentially lead into another world.
Yourself and Yours (2016) has drawn comparison to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), I think reasonably so. And what’s remarkable about it is how Hong manages to achieve similarly confounding effects without having to give up a basic internal coherence, without having to “break” his film in the way that Buñuel does with his alternating actresses. Hong can keep the conversational rhythms afforded by his single-take two-shots, while allowing the generic farce elements (identical twins, drunkenness, roleplay) to turn each cut into a matter of probability, to transform what is essentially a remarriage comedy into a vertiginous game of chance. Yourself and Yours, then, offered at least one “solution” to the issues raised by its predecessor. Each cut being a potential rupture, the film sidesteps the “problem” of one alternative having to follow or precede another: Its undecidable final shot contains both “right now” and “wrong then.”
The Day After (2017) exemplifies the potential of this new understanding. For if any element, any cut or transition, any coincidence in the dialogue, no matter how unassuming, can theoretically rupture the film, interrupting the progression of clock-time, then one can unsettle and transform even the simplest story structures. The Day After initially seems to present two parallel timelines, with scenes motivated not so much by chronology as emotional content. Only later, when Kim Min-hee’s Areum rounds a corner to see her boss and his lover embracing, does the film’s title click into place, revealing a simplicity that was there all along in the title. The film’s coda likewise illustrates something of this post–Right Now, Wrong Then understanding: Areum meets the boss in his office, and repeated dialogue suggests that we are seeing a parallel world—until we realize that we are simply witnessing a lapse in memory.
Filmmakers like Straub-Huillet and James Benning are sometimes spoken of as “reclaiming,” as it were, the fixed-frame aesthetics of the early cinema. Similarly, one might see Hong as “reclaiming” (and thereby reinvigorating) a vast range of storytelling techniques: films-within-films, flashbacks, dream sequences, and the like. But whereas his previous films did so with an explicitness that bordered on hostile, his recent films often maintain the outward impression that they have no structural gamesmanship at all. And the effect can be uniquely discombobulating. If one wanted to measure something of this change, one could do worse than contrast the crucial mid-film shift in Tale of Cinema (2005) with the various meta-fictional shifts in The Novelist’s Film (2022), which are more confounding for being more difficult, if not impossible, to definitively “frame.”
Now, I don’t want to overstate the change that occurred with Right Now, Wrong Then, or to somehow rank the pre- and post-2015 periods relative to each other. Still less do I want to suggest that one cannot read the “discoveries” of Right Now, Wrong Then back into the films that came before it. In fact, I might go so far as to say that this change in Hong’s filmmaking should reveal something latent in those previous works. (The dated chronology of Night and Day, for instance, may seem even richer and more complex in retrospect.) Rather, I simply want to suggest that the formal play in the films from 2016 onwards is, because less signposted, in danger of being overlooked or underestimated; and that we, as viewers, are perhaps not fulfilling our portion of the contract.
I should say that I haven’t been uniformly positive on the films from 2016 onwards, at least on first viewings. I’m not always energized by Hong’s increasing compositional laxity, and the improvisatory dead air that creeps into these later films can be trying at times. It’s somewhat startling to return to, say, Turning Gate (2002), and be reminded that there was a time when Hong’s films looked like that. But there’s much more to “formalism” than pleasing compositions, and what I’m currently working through is the extent to which Hong’s recent “aesthetic” (if we want to call it that) is necessary to the effects that I find most valuable in the actual films. This is something that Walk Up (2022), which I’ve written on at length, and which I consider his best in quite some time, helped clarify for me. The linked review includes a fair amount of story detail, but my basic account of the film is as follows:
With both [The Day After and The Day He Arrives] it shares Hong’s keen grasp of character psychology and narrative probability, which allows him to play off structural and temporal gamesmanship as quirks of human behavior, but also, equally, to go the other way, and use psychological insight to motivate absurd story shapes. If The Day After tends more to the former, eventually allowing us to assemble its events into a linear chronology (as when a possibly new iteration of the story is revealed to be a character’s memory lapse), The Day He Arrives tends to the latter, building up a cyclical repetition of events that is nothing short of Borgesian. The remarkable achievement of Walk Up is that Hong manages to accommodate both tendencies within a single film, at once offering a linear, behaviourally coherent chronology and a metaphysical image of simultaneously coexisting presents.
The sense of it as unfolding as a linear chronology does not usually present any difficulties to viewers. If anything, the most frustrating thing about reviews of the film is their tendency to see only a strictly chronological timeline. From a different director, it may be possible to view the film solely in these terms—that is, as observing four different afternoons spanning years, with Kwon Hae-hyo’s character on different floors of the same walk-up apartment, the first two times as a visitor, the second two as a resident. Given that we are dealing with the director of The Day He Arrives, the reading seems more unlikely. And once one considers the uncanny coincidences that proliferate across the runtime, the strain of sticking solely to a rigid timeline becomes overwhelming.
Hong has of course made ample use of narrative coincidences in the past. The difference here is how those coincidences—or synchronicities, to use the Jungian term—show up. In Turning Gate, we hear an ancient myth about a Chinese princess loved by a commoner, which both explains the title and lays the ground for the film’s climax, and from the moment it is spoken it is freighted with significance. In Walk Up, by contrast, no individual element is immediately tagged with such import. The film opens with an unremarkable shot of the entrance to the walk-up apartment, which is later repeated in the film’s second part, leading us to expect formal play (i.e., a second iteration of the same day). It is only when the shot is repeated that we even take notice of it as a composition; only later do we entertain the possibility that its seeming aesthetic indifference may be strategic. And the same goes for other elements like dialogue. Much of Walk Up’s first part provides us with details that we only later—sometimes much later—even recognize to be narrative detail at all. The halting, improvisatory air of the film’s conversations can be somewhat alienating—but at least one effect of it is to make it nigh-impossible to pick out beforehand which lines will be of consequence. In the first two sections of Walk Up, talk of Jeju Island does not initially stand out in any way (cf. the story in Turning Gate), and melds right into the conversational atmosphere. It’s only in the third and fourth sections that it becomes recognizable as having any importance at all. The fact that such details are always mediated by memory, the fact that they only ever strike us in retrospect, having been granted no pre-existing significance, imbues their reappearance with a unique charge.
Without going so far as to embrace this “flattening” of dialogue and compositional sense, then, I am willing to regard it as a necessary limitation of Hong’s recent period. For one thing, this aesthetic “flattening” wouldn’t work half so well if Hong weren’t so keenly attuned to the way we process information—especially narrative information. For another, the new approach leads to “crystalline” effects that were not present in the previous period. It’s as if Hong’s absurd story structures, although no longer marked out in overt ways, are still present in the films, transparently superimposed on the events we do see, but viewable only through special bifocal lenses. (Introduction and In Front of Your Face are especially instructive in this regard.) Turning Gate is a very great work—practically a fulfillment of what Béla Balázs sought when he asked in 1924 why no one had yet made any “déjà vu films…in which the spectre of one event seems to shine through another, making the entire surrounding world transparent.” But we also notice the great lengths that Hong must go to build to that film’s climax, whereas in his recent work he seems to be challenging himself to do the opposite—to get at these ecstatic, numinous synchronicities by the sparest means possible. And in the dazzling closing flourish of Walk Up, I think he succeeds, not just revealing new forms by which “the spectre of one event might shine through another,” but also expanding the means by which this can be accomplished.
Now eleven films since Right Now, Wrong Then—twelve if one includes the forthcoming in water (2023)—it is about time to properly reckon with this recent period. One need not necessarily accept Hong’s metaphysics of time (or rather my account of it) to do so. But at the very least, we should start seeing the almost disconcerting simplicity of these films not as lax or indifferent, but strategic. There is such a thing as earning one’s aesthetic, and Hong has earned his many times over.