Letting Go in On the Beach at Night Alone
By Rajlakshmi Bhagawati
The end of a relationship almost always leaves one or both partners in a quest for closure, generally as a separate mission. Friends and family, films and women’s magazines have discussed how closure functions as a way to heal the ailing heart. Hong Sangsoo, the filmmaker known for exploring layers of modern romance in his films, has come closest to portraying the turmoil during the aftermath of a relationship and seeking closure in On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). The film follows Young-hee (played by Kim Minhee) in Hamburg and then Gangneung after the scandalous rumors of her relationship with a married filmmaker. Young-hee goes on an emotional journey of hope and anger, striving to move on.
Still shots display the emptiness in the spaces around our protagonist Young-hee, which mirrors the emptiness and stagnation within the character, the feeling of a void left at the end of a relationship. This void gives the character, and in turn the viewer, a sense of being stagnant, of being stuck, and it is accomplished with long shots of minimal composition. The emptiness is also reflected in the way sound has been incorporated within the film—it’s mostly quiet, but there are moments of loud eruption of banter fueled by soju and the occasional instrumental music that accompanies scenes, making the emotion of the void even more strongly felt.
We see how Young-hee is trying to find a place for herself, a comfortable space in which she feels she belongs, where she feels loved and accepted. Young-hee is seen asking her friend Jun-hee “Should I live here in Gangneung?”—a question also posed to her friend in Hamburg. It is as if, in searching for a space of belonging, she is asking to be held, to find someone to share her thoughts—to fill the emptiness.
In the scene where Young-hee goes to the beach in Hamburg with her friend and acquaintances, she seems to take slower steps and isolates herself from the group. She is calm, like the winter sea in this scene, still hopeful but touching reality, simply missing and remembering her lover with fondness. In contrast to this, the last scene, when she dreams of finally meeting the filmmaker and dining together with his crew members, is an outburst of self-consciously naked emotions. (She is then woken up by a stranger who warns her she is sleeping too close to the sea, something potentially dangerous to do, the high tide waves resembling the mood of her turbulent dream.) To say that Young-hee grows more turbulent towards the end needs to be justified, since she is dormant and calm at most times. She becomes more direct, as she describes herself, and she speaks her mind and heart without censoring it to appease others. Hence, the scene in her dream when she finally meets the filmmaker is cathartic for the narrative, and for her. We often find ourselves amid questions and situations that don’t provide answers but we look for them anyway. In a tale about the end of a complicated relationship, Young-hee finds some closure or comfort from the dream; she gets to have the conversation that isn’t possible in real life, and she gets to have a moment in which she can excitedly announce that she’s thankful that he loved her. She gets to listen to him apologize and affirm that the emotions they shared were real, as he reads an excerpt from a book that inspires his next film about a person he loved. Although this all occurs in her dream, it shows that sometimes we can achieve some peace by dreaming up scenes like this.
On the Beach at Night Alone isn’t a film with dramatic twists; there is a sense of the everyday. The grief of the woman after the end of the relationship is felt through “everydayness,” such as when she hums a song of yearning while smoking alone outside a café. To love a person who is already married or to fall in love outside one’s marriage—unacceptable in a moral sense and most societies—isn’t easy. It’s even harder to let go of such feelings. The grief surrounding the end of the affair is no less for Young-hee simply because it’s morally problematic.
I was unaware of the similarities between reel and real life in the film when I initially watched it; considering this, the question of morality becomes even more important, I suppose. Yet the film feels truer for the same very reason—the desire to find some comfort in the mess, through overseas trips, reconnecting with old friends, or dreaming of an unplanned meeting. It appears to be a film in which Hong Sangsoo is indirectly addressing his truth. In a self-referential way, the filmmaker/ex-lover in Young-hee’s dream says that he will shoot the film as it comes to him, a similar approach to how he makes his own work.
The film beautifully articulates the quietness that dawns upon one after the end of a relationship. The phase of hope, denial, grief, longing, and, through it all, letting go of the person and one’s memories. Long conversations encourage the viewer to consider questions about love, loss, friendship, forgiveness, loneliness, and desire. Like an unnamed character says in the film, “Very, very simple pieces, but if you go deeper they are more complicated.”
Rajlakshmi Bhagawati is a postgraduate in Film Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi, India. She writes about films when she isn’t watching them.