At Night Alone: the Intimate Experience of Meeting with Hong Sangsoo’s Films
by Ren Scateni
At the time of its UK release, I went to my local art-house cinema to watch Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016). Embarrassingly, it was the first time I had heard of the director so I went in with almost no expectations, lured by both the lesbian subtext and the country of origin of the film. I’ve always been interested in East Asian cinema but my field of expertise was limited to Japanese films. Being sucked in by Park’s unashamed, forceful, and raw visual storytelling was too much of a pleasure not to start looking at Korean filmmakers with vivid interest. Among the whirlwind of my emotion and excitement towards a whole new world of discoveries, something else hit hard—or should I say, someone. Unbeknown to me, actress Kim Minhee entered the scene, infusing her surroundings with ethereal grace and a piercing yet languid gaze. I was left dumbstruck but then, as with all things, time passed and my memory of her started to fade.
Undoubtedly, being away from the festival circuit surely does take a toll on one’s curated, somehow a tiny bit snobbish, list of East Asian directors. Coming to the rescue and countering a sloppy distribution in the UK, where none of Hong Sangsoo’s films except Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013) has been nationally distributed, the streaming platform MUBI offered a mini-retrospective on the works of the Korean director. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon introduced me both to the quirkiness that characterizes some of Hong’s features and to his blurry, mismatched timelines. Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) won me over with the melancholic ineluctability of those relationships that are simply not meant to be, despite the many what-ifs and turnarounds one may take. By the end of the film, I was convinced: Hong’s aesthetics are meant for me, with all those conversations in cozy coffee shops in which his characters are cocooned against the tide of the outside world while seemingly jumping in and out of dreams. Only some days later it sank in that the actress who so much impressed me was none other than Kim Minhee. Once again we were reunited, if only across the screen on my old laptop.
At this point, Kim took my hand and walked me through all the other films featured in the catalogue in which she starred. I shivered at On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). I was intrigued by Claire’s Camera (2017). I stood by the intellectual acumen of Areum (Kim’s character) in The Day After (2017). To think that these films were shot in close succession or maybe even in a perfect continuum and then released over the same year speaks for not only the chemistry between the director and his muse, but also for their commitment and bravura. Usually revolving around film directors or, broadly speaking, figures within the film industry—in On the Beach at Night Alone, for instance, Kim plays an actress on-hiatus—Hong’s films capture romantic affairs on the brink of disruption, if not on the cusp of taking form. His characters fluctuate in a timeless limbo between sparse attempts at direct confrontations, where laying bare their mutual feelings seems too big of an obstacle to overcome. And his heroines may seem, at first sight, to be tangled up in the traditional patriarchal narrative that filters through the convoluted threads of his films, but on a second thought their portrayals sum up a sensible representation of women struggling with dreams, aspirations, romances, and desires. They’re hardly a passive product of the male gaze that fails to be shaped to match up to a man’s ideal. Instead, they’re agents of their own gaze, which, in turn, informs the narration.
Watching Hong’s films (which are never judgmental despite the often not-so-morally-licit liaisons portrayed on screen), I felt as if fragments of myself were scattered across them and then molded into different characters, all of them distilled into the ever-so-composed elegance of Kim Minhee: I followed her struggling and second-guessing herself, her worth, and even her ethos when Manhee, her character in Claire’s Camera, is abruptly accused of being dishonest and then fired in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival. At the time I was working at a film festival myself, a much lesser-known one, when I must have sensed a looming, similar fate, hanging over me. There was less drama of course, and no drunken affair involved, but I met the failure of my involvement with almost the same perplexed irony of someone who really wasn’t prepared for so much free time in the hot and crowded Croisette. In On the Beach at Night Alone I witnessed the ordeals of Young-hee’s (Kim’s character) while unsettlingly moving from Germany back to South Korea, incapable of spiraling away from her ex-lover’s memory—not incidentally, a pretty well-known film director and an obvious alter-ego of Hong Sangsoo himself—and I was reminded of my own life many years ago, when I was under the spell of an older man and trying to decide who I wanted to be.
Over the span of a few weeks, I was welcomed into the circle of Hong Sangsoo’s admirers while glimpses of both my past and my future fatefully came together to enrich my (cinematic) experience.
As I stared at Kim’s performances, cinema’s benevolent eye returned my gaze.
Ren Scateni has written for The Skinny, Vague Visages, Screen Queens, and Take One.