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| Oki's Movie |
Among the South Korean cinema spotlight films at the 2010 AFI Fest was the Hong Sang-soo double bill of his latest work, Oki’s Movie and Hahaha, the latter the winner of the Un certain regard prize at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival.
Hong Sang-soo’s cinema is insular in its visual and thematic preoccupations. His dissection of relationships and friendships between men and women, young and old, parents and offspring, and his attention to form, especially through parallels and repetitions continuously challenge any straitlaced, linear narrative structures, forms, and spectatorship. In turn, they challenge any straightforward approach to writing about them, with their multiple temporalities, perspectives, and intimate interweaving character trajectories. With these two films, Hong affirms the cinema-as-life, life-as-cinema overlap that hinges on the triangular relationship of two men/women and one man/woman on the one hand, and the filmmaker, film, and spectator on the other hand.
Oki’s Movie tells of a young woman’s succeeding set of relationships with a film professor and a fellow film student-filmmaker. Hong presents this love triangle through four short, interrelated films or segments, according to one of the characters’ perspectives. The first three segments present the perspectives of the men, while the last one presents that of the woman. Although the temporalities of each segment overlap, nevertheless there is a subtle chronological development that traces Oki’s romance with Professor Song, its conclusion, and the start of a romance with student filmmaker Jin-gu.
Hahaha takes the premise of the love triangle and multiplies it by two. It is about two male friends, Mun-kyung and Ban-shik, who meet before one of them leaves South Korea. They exchange anecdotes of recent happenings in their lives, as they drink shots; each anecdote is punctuated by a shot. Their meeting is presented through black-and-white photographs/film stills, while their exchanged anecdotes take place unknowingly in the same seaside town of Tong-yeong where Mun-kyung’s mother has a globefish restaurant, and where Jun-shik’s poet friend lives. Because of the smallness of the town, each man encounters at some point each woman who may or may not be going out with one of the other two men. Though unaware of each other’s links and overlaps, the film follows Mun-kyung pursuit of a strong-willed, history-loving woman (Moon So-ri) who in turn is in love with Jun-shik’s young, immature, confused poet friend. Jun-shik, in turn, has his girlfriend join him, even though he is married and has a child.
In Oki’s Movie, one senses the squirming of a turn to lightness in tone and a kind of amusing frivolity that’s less oppressive for all parties (spectator and characters) than in previous Hong films. Among the four film segments, the last one, ‘Oki’s Movie’, is the most memorable, nearly endearing, and wistful. The preponderance of male perspectives of the first three films-segments was getting tiresome, so having the woman’s point of view was refreshing, to say the least. ‘Oki’s Movie’ is also the most literal presentation of Hong’s predilection for parallels and repetitions. For one thing, it is presented as Oki’s student film. Secondly, it consists of Oki visiting Mount Acha on two different occasions, with Professor Song on the first occasion, and Jin-gu on the second. Through voiceover, she compares and contrasts her feelings and everyone’s actions on each occasion, which creates a fifth film per se for the spectator, a film space created by these accumulated points of view with which to reflect ultimately upon issues like positionality, habitus, place, meaning, and their fleeting, yet meaningful qualities, especially in the context of love and romance. In this sense, ‘Oki’s Movie’ is a kind of emotional and intellectual payoff whose meaning emerges only after following the three other film segments. Despite a belaboured feeling due to the film’s literalness in its segmented form, which makes the relationships and characters a little bit forced and ultimately less memorable than the film’s form, it contains what is perhaps one of the most nightmarish Q&A experiences, where an ex-girlfriend’s friend turns the Q&A for Jin-gu’s film into an interrogation of why he broke her heart.
If Oki’s Movie delivers only in spots, in contrast, Hahaha is my favourite Hong film thus far. The entomological-like attention to relationships is still present, as is the attention to place, repetition, parallel, and multiple points of view overlapping dynamically with each other. But this time, Hong presents this musical chair-type of encounters, breakups, pursuits, regrets, and arguments in such an effortless, laughing-at-them-because-he-loves-them way that it’s nearly parodic, and thus charming. Even the formal strategy of showing the friends’ drinking meeting through black-and-white photographs/stills is made jovial, reflecting the playful suspension of time passing in their meeting against the film’s other temporalities contained in the anecdotes. Indeed, their conversation and drinking anchor the film’s criss-crossing and migratory narrative.
The two friends’ opposite personalities complement the film’s juggling act of anguish and unconcern. On the one hand, Jun-shik’s narrative trajectory references by far the most strained, overly intellectual, cynical, tormented male characters in Hong’s oeuvre, so that to call Hahaha a comedy from his point of view would be anything but painful irony. His dry laugh that marks a lot of his scenes comes from a deep, dark corner of his angst-ridden psyche, and gives an explicit demonstration of that painful irony.
On the other hand, providing some of the most endearing comic situations is Kim Sang-kyung as the unemployed filmmaker Mun-kyung. He pursues Seong-ok with all the bumbling, sweet awkwardness of a gangly newborn, and cries with as much abandon for his love for his mother as much as for the historical figure Admiral Yu, whom he mysteriously encounters at one point in the film. During their droll master-pupil conversation, where Mun-kyung is on his knees, he begs Admiral Yu for keys to the doors of inspiration.
With these two films, Hahaha in particular, Hong all but illustrates how he not only has the keys to the doors of inspiration, but he has let us in to share it, with a cool, comical aplomb. RSA
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