Hong Sangsoo's Right Now, Wrong Then

Korean director Hong Sangsoo was brought to my attention by a recent article in Film Comment about him, written by Dan Sullivan.  Hong has made 21 movies and some of them are available on DVD.

Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) is a fairly successful attempt to go back to the beginning of film, to the time of D.W.Griffith and even before, to think about what a film can and should be.  The simplicity of Hong's style reminds one of Eric Rohmer's films (though without the philosophical insight) or  those of Yasujiro Ozu (without the historical reflections):  two characters talk within a single shot, with an occasional relatively unobtrusive zoom (zoom lenses go back to the twenties, though were used most extensively in the 1970's).  In Hong's film a director, Ham (played by Jung Jae-young) comes early to a film festival in Suwon and picks up a woman artist, Hea-jung (played by Kim Min-hee).  They drink, become inebriated and part ways when she finds out he is married.  Then the film starts all over again, with things going in a slightly different direction, where Ham (usually called "director Ham") takes Hea-jung home (she lives with her mother) and then says good-bye to her while she is watching his film the next day, after she literally leaves him out in the cold.

The differences in the two parts are relatively subtle, demonstrating how a slight word or two can make a significant change in a burgeoning relationship.  In the first part Ham comes across more as a womanizer, perhaps having even come early to Suwon to see if he can find a woman to impress with his status as a film director, and tells Hea-jung what he thinks she wants to hear, narrating to some extent what he is up to.  In the second part he seems to care more for Hea-jung but still acts like something of a drunken lout, especially when he goes with her to a party with her friends, after she has told him she has no friends; he heads back to Seoul as she walks home alone in the snow. The film is a good example of what Jean-Luc Godard once said about a film:  it should take half-way between the viewer and the screen.  Can we change who we are and how we behave in different times and places and with different people?  As Hea-jung walks home has her encounter with Ham changed her in any way?