Director Hong Sang-soo
ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja) C+
South Korea
Germany (101 mi) 2017 d: Hong
Sang-soo
On the beach at night
alone,
As the old mother
sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright
stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the
future.
—Walt Whitman, brief excerpt from Leaves of Grass, 1855, On
the Beach at Night Alone by Walt Whitman | Poetry Foundation
While the entire film community at large is in near
unanimous approval of this film, praising it to the hilt, with some even
claiming it may be the director’s best film, don’t believe them. Having now seen eleven of this director’s
films, this is the first real misfire, becoming the most superficial of all his
films, suggesting he’s lost some of his perspective, at least for this
film. While overtly autobiographical,
though hardly identical with reality, this film utilizes actress Kim Min-hee to
the point of over-saturation in an overtly transparent attempt to regain her
stature, which apparently worked, winning the Best Actress award at the Berlin
Film Festival, the first award ever handed out to a female actress in a Hong Sang-soo
film, as she is in nearly every shot of the film, with all the attention of the
script paid to her throughout. Going
through recognizably similar personal travails that she’s had to endure in real
life, caught up in a scandalous adultery affair with this director, who left
his wife to be with Kim, which left a stain on her career, though here Hong continually
puts her up on a pedestal, viewed as an acclaimed celebrity, where she’s grown
used to hearing people sing her praises and literally worship the ground she
walks on, as one after another genuflects at the altar of this actress. One quickly grows tired of every secondary
character in the film thinking exclusively of her, where the director,
apparently, expects viewers to adore her as he does, which feels like manipulative
overkill, actually cheapening the film and dulling the senses. In true Hong fashion, the film is
well-crafted, told in two parts, where each mirrors the other, but is discernibly
thin, mostly revealing what we already know, offering precious little insight,
where they come across as two people who think only of themselves. If there is one common feeling that pervades
throughout the film, it is overpraise, and neither the director nor his lead
actress actually come to terms with this inflated view of themselves, as
instead it’s written into the narrative.
People that place themselves so far above others aren’t really that
interesting, as they deludedly view themselves in a substantially different
manner than anyone else, thinking they and they alone are worth thinking and
talking about, becoming overly egocentric, actually minimizing the influence of
others, or ignoring them altogether. As
if he’s above the fray, Hong misses an opportunity for true self-awareness,
which have been a mainstay of his films since the beginning, making this feel more
like a travesty.
A wintry air provides the natural setting of the latest Hong
film, opening with a sublime and distinctly heavenly passage (the opening
phrase) from the Adagio movement (17:28) of
one of Schubert’s breathtakingly beautiful final works, Schubert
/ Rostropovich / Taneyev Quartet, 1963: Quintet in C major, Op. posth. 163 -
Complete YouTube (53:27), as the film opens in Hamburg, Germany of all
places, a beautiful city situated on a gorgeous waterfront. Young-hee (Kim Min-hee) plays a famous
actress who is taking a break from all the publicity in Seoul swirling around
her illicit affair with a married filmmaker that ended badly, perhaps getting
as far away from the scandal as possible, visiting an older friend who lives
there, Jee-young (Seo Young-hwa), who loves the natural beauty of the town, as
the two smoke off the balcony, take walks, or visit bookstores, where a
terminally ill man strangely describes his own piano compositions, “These are simple pieces, but if you go
deeper, they become more complicated,” which could easily be a reference to
Hong’s own film career as well. As they
walk around the city, Young-hee is continually waiting for the
possibility of an expected friend to meet them, though nothing is certain. As Young-hee explains it, “He knows where I
am.” Having lived with a man for ten
years, suggesting “men all want the same thing,” Jee prefers living alone, free
from compromise, or interruption, rebuffing her younger friend’s offer to dreamily
live together in this European city, though Young-hee clearly wants to see her
mystery friend, but is instead content to openly share her romantic regrets
with Jee, still stung by heartbreak, acknowledging she’s still in love with
this man, but confused by the disconcerting state she’s in, wondering “Where’s
love? It’s not even visible. You need to see it in order to search for it.” Eventually having dinner in the home of a
local couple (that incudes Mark Peranson, editor of Cinema Scope magazine), before the night is done, they find their
way to the beach, where the scene fades to black before beginning again,
listing new cast credits. Each half is shot by a different
cinematographer (Kim Hyung-koo and Park Hong-yeol, respectively). When the lights come on, Young-hee is all
alone in a darkened movie theater, a familiar place in Hong films, an often
indistinguishable world where reality and fantasy intersect. As she walks out the theater door, she begins
to reconnect with old friends who happily welcome her back to South Korea, now
staying at a beachfront hotel overlooking the sea in the coastal city of
Gangneung, which we are reminded is revered for being the most livable city in
the country, according to some poll (exactly the same with Hamburg).
The reintegration process moves slowly, first meeting one
friend for coffee, who has to abruptly leave before another arrives, leaving
her a moment to smoke outside, singing a mournful song to herself before
embracing a flower in bloom. This coffee
collective eventually meets for the first of two dinner sequences, where we see
Young-hee drunkenly lash out at others, suggesting they don’t know what they’re
talking about, calling all men idiots, then exasperatingly raising her voice to
condemn those at the table as people who aren’t even “qualified to love,”
literally dismissing them from her stratosphere, before turning to the woman
beside her and offering her a kiss.
After a short embrace, the two women depart, leaving the others
embarrassingly caught off-guard and a bit befuddled. The next day we find Young-hee dressed in her
familiar overcoat, sleeping on the beach, with the pounding waves seen over her
shoulder. A man wakes her up, claiming
he was worried about her, and asks her to come warm-up with his friends, as
they’ve built a fire. They are members
of a film crew that happen to be in town for a film shoot, meeting up later for
a second dinner sequence with the director present, who, it turns out, is Young-hee’s
romantically connected director, Sang-won
(Moon Sung-Keun), but she is so inebriated she tells him he looks like a grandpa. He, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with telling
her how “pretty” she is, where all his cohorts at the table agree with his
assessment, behaving like puppets, affirming everything he says like a
religious mantra, actually mocking the sincerity of his thoughts. Continually shining the light on this actress,
the director offers nothing but platitudes, heaping praise upon her that she
seems more than delighted to absorb.
When he breaks down, obviously still not over their relationship, it
only affirms the hold she still has on him, reading a passage from a book that
he wrote for her, recalling how it felt when it was happening. While the two are clearly in their own little
world, the others at the table are ignored and treated as if they’re not
“qualified” to be there, but they are, presumably observing this private moment
which is unlike any other that they’ve witnessed, offering a rare window into
the vulnerability of their lives.
Returning to the earlier scene at the beach with Young-hee asleep
in her overcoat, it is viewed from a different perspective this time
around. After she is awakened, there is
a long pan to the right where the film crew sits around the fire, returning
back to the place where Young-hee was lying but she’s no longer there, as if it
was all a mirage, before continuing the pan to the left where at the far edge of the screen we see her being carried off on the
back of some strange man, fading to black, with a final credit sequence playing
in utter silence.
No comments:
Post a Comment