In Our Day (Uriui haru)

 

Writer/director Hong Sang-soo

IN OUR DAY (Uriui haru)                B-                                                                                  South Korea  (83 mi)  2023  d: Hong Sang-soo

A diptych of two interconnected storylines, in this case two renowned artists, an actress and a poet who never meet, yet have younger visitors who come to visit seeking guidance and advice.  Immersed in the banalities of our everyday existence, this evolves into something more, leading to unexpected complexities that arise from the simplicity of the format.  The filmmaker writes, directs, films, produces, edits, and composes the scores to his films, which are very dialogue driven, with a lyrical orchestral motif opening and closing the film, where each of his movies have a very similar style, with end credits that last only a few seconds.  What this resembles is the Socratic method of using ordinary question-and-answer dialogue to spark critical thinking, to explore larger, more complex ideas, where its deceptively simple structure and unvarnished aesthetic allows quiet, intimate moments to breathe life into unearthing profound truths in the mundane.  Embracing subtlety in the unspoken and the art of the understated, with long dialogues that always seem to revolve around a single point, without ever finding it, as words fail to fill the void between people, often leaving behind an even deeper sense of loneliness, yet this is a very simple premise that produces an elevated discussion on modern existence.  Not exactly riveting cinema, this is low-key, even for this director, but he’s attempting to get at something that is largely ignored in today’s cinema, as the relaxed, informality on display allows for a more personal discussion, as there’s a lot of wisdom coming out of this movie, accentuating how young people seem to want answers now, while an older generation appreciates acquiring a perspective from the experience of actually living a life, where the characters are really trying to get at a better understanding of their own lives, often without success, so they seek guidance.  Hong explores our constant striving to find meaning and how this evolves alongside age and experience.  The structure itself doesn’t always feel natural, often appearing forced, where there’s even a brief moment of melodramatic hysteria that is completely absent from the rest of the Hong repertoire, feeling weirdly out of sorts, as if brought in from another movie, where viewers can certainly question its use, wondering why such a delicately subtle movie exhibits an elevated emotional outburst that has been intentionally absent from the director’s other works.  So that may be what stands out, as it doesn’t fit the mold, but other than that, this is an extremely understated style of filmmaking, shot inside apartments in controlled settings, feeling claustrophobic at times, where just walking out onto the balcony produces an air of freedom and liberation.  There’s also the use of a fluffy cat connecting these two episodes, affectionate and friendly in the first, but it goes missing, producing the over-the-top emotional hysteria, while in the second the poet’s cat is recently dead, but continues to have a lingering influence.  The effect animals have on human owners is something rare and significant, where there’s a special connection, like being part of the family, as it’s life after all, and that matters, in all its iterations.   

Hong uses an inner title card like chapter headings, used to describe state of mind as well as catch us up on what’s happening (“Sang-won trusts her friend, but she thinks the only one she can trust is herself”), a technique that was also used by Chaplin and Keaton during the silent era, as it adds greater psychological complexity, but this film lacks the offbeat charm in some of his other movies.  Sang-won (Kim Min-hee) is a successful actress recently returned to Korea, who is staying with her friend Jung-soo (Song Sun-mi) and her cat named “Us,” eventually joined by her cousin, an aspiring actress named Ji-soo (Park Mi-so).  Sang-won takes an interest in Jung-soo’s cat Us, feeding and petting him, getting down on the floor with him, with a large mirror covering an entire wall reflecting what we see, but the camera never intrudes.  While Sang-won is drinking coffee, Jung-soo is sipping wine.  Soon, Sang-won’s cousin Ji-soo arrives bearing gifts in the form of a basket of beauty products, including organic soaps and natural oils.  When asked about acting, Sang-won indicates honesty is the key, as everything is generated from that core value, which is why it is so essential.  But it’s not easy being honest in a predetermined system controlled by others, who write what you say and instruct where you move before the cameras, leaving you little choice but to follow their orders.  This exasperating and suffocating system takes all the fun out of acting, as you must confine yourself to the ideas and values of others, not your own, which makes it extremely difficult to give honest performances.  Based on these contradictions, she’s not really interested in acting anymore, as you tend to lose your own perspective when continually trying to please others.  Cutting to a different scene across town, old poet Hong Ui-ju (Gi Ju-bong) is at a different crossroads (“Hong Ui-ju has belatedly become popular with young people, but all he wants is to live a peaceful life free of pain”), as his health won’t allow him to drink and smoke anymore, yet they were two of his most cherished things in life, as he became recognized as an artist for being associated with taking great pleasure in drinking and smoking, often with meals, where they just seemed to go together.  But his heart is bad, weakened by clogged arteries, so those habits would invite a death sentence if he continued.  Unaware of this recent change, young actor Jae-won (Ha Seong-guk) also comes bearing gifts of cigarettes and alcohol, armed with questions to ask the poet, who has found sudden popularity among young people, yet it’s the temptations that lie in wait that seem to matter.  Sharing connections as the film goes on, using a deeply personal style described as domestic realism, Hong makes slow-moving dramas about everyday dilemmas, relationships, and artistic aspirations, examining the effect it has on our lives, exploring fundamental themes of loneliness, incommunicability, and the search for authenticity.

Cutting back and forth between stories, a young film student Ki-joo (Kim Seung-yun) is finishing up shooting a documentary film about the old poet, so she films him taking great delight in eating ramyun noodles, adding hot pepper paste to enhance the flavor, making it more spicy, mirrored by Sang-won when she eats ramyun in the exact same way, but it reminds him that this would go great with a glass of soju.  Accommodating his desires, she goes out to buy non-alcoholic beer, but this only reminds him of what he’s missing, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re sharing a banquet of fried chicken with soju and cigarettes, which is like a return of all his former pleasures, becoming intoxicated with what he’d been missing, with the three of them taking great pleasure in the drinking game of rock, paper, scissors, with the loser required to drink a glass of soju, where the young apprentices continually finding themselves losing.  Meanwhile, across town, the cat escaped, apparently jumping from the balcony, leaving Jung-soo utterly devastated, left screaming and moaning while writhing on the floor in tears, where she can’t imagine her life without her cat, just like the old poet can’t imagine living a life without soju and cigarettes.  So when these precious things have been taken away, it opens new doors of insight, which are not necessarily welcome or appreciated.  It begs the question about what is the true self, where the pursuit of honesty becomes exceedingly difficult to obtain.  In this light, Sang-won gives an impassioned defense for why she can’t work in the commercialized film industry any more, which may as well be the independent film manifesto for Hong Sang-soo, while the old poet gives an equally passionate treatise on the art of poetry and whether it still matters in this day and age, where people don’t read poetry anymore or pay as much attention as they do the other arts.  While sitting on an outside terrace, he urges them to be careful not to get hung up on big philosophical concepts like love, honesty, and truth, which remain always evasive, and instead concentrate on the little things that matter, encouraging them to “Be thankful for the small things that are right in front of us.”  Unlike the beginning, which took forever to find its footing, the film builds momentum towards the end, becoming a spirited modern day discussion on how people fool themselves into believing things that don’t really matter, finding themselves awkward and empty, and leading meaningless lives.  Part of being honest is knowing what’s limiting you, what’s wrapping over your true self layer by layer and preventing you from being happier with your life.  In making his 30^th film, Hong’s cinema becomes a process of continuous exploration, a place where questions about existence, art, and human relationships can be addressed, though never resolved.  This tension between the need for understanding and the impossibility of achieving it is what makes Hong’s cinema so deeply human and universal.  In the end, according to the poet, life is short, and we’ll never really discover any of the answers, so it’s important to choose wisely how to fill up the time we have for our lives.  “Maintaining a clear vision might be the hardest thing in the world.”

Walk Up (Tab)

 

Writer/director Hong Sang-soo

WALK UP (Tab)        B                                                                                                           South Korea  (97 mo)  2022  d: Hong Sang-soo

A minimalist, architectural story from Hong Sang-soo, yet another example of just how unique and original an artist he is, a rejection of the norms that dictate what movies should be and how they get made, as this is a truly different kind of movie, modest in scope, even for him, yet emblematic of a “post-political” Korea.  In this case, the most prominent character is a building, comprised of four floors, each containing a different chapter of the story, focusing on its exploration of a film director's life through a four-story building in Seoul, where the film utilizes the vertical structure to explore relationships and shifting realities, with the changing floors evoking progressions in time, as the lives of four women intersect and weave together like parallel worlds, but is actually an infinite exploration towards the everyday, seen from a variety of prisms that connect in a terribly intimate way, either in the most emotional aspect or in the purely cinematic, where it’s hard to decipher just what’s going on here, as time advances unknowingly between episodes, making large, unexpected leaps in chronology, where much of what happens takes place offscreen, with viewers hard-pressed to comprehend what’s transpired in the unseen, empty spaces in between.  In fact, the only way to know we’re advancing to a new chapter is the guitar music interlude, or maybe it’s a mandolin, composed by the director himself, who once again writes, directs, edits, films, and produces this film, which is shot in high contrast black and white.  Celebrated for its signature minimalist style, painting a poetic and intimate portrait of the daily life of a building populated by artists, the film explores art, memory, and aging, with the passage of time becoming a significant aspect, as perspectives change over time.  Kwon Hae-hyo is acclaimed director Byung-soo, often seen as a stand-in for Hong himself, completely recognizable in his ninth film with the director, where the actor openly acknowledges his working method, “the key is not to prepare anything.”  He arrives with his estranged adult daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so), who is an aspiring interior decorator, at a building greeted by an old friend, who is the building owner, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young), but also well established in the designer field.  She gives them a tour of the property, which includes a restaurant and cooking studio on the first two floors, her office in the basement, a residence on the third floor, and an artist’s studio on the top filled with abstract paintings, which she generously offers to the director, as the current occupant, a painter, has run out of funds to pay rent.  They catch up over a bottle of wine, but Byung-soo leaves for an important meeting at his film office nearby, leaving Jeong-su alone with Ms. Kim to discuss her ambitions, which sound earnest enough, hoping to work as her apprentice, though it remains questionable whether she’s really serious enough, instead confessing thoughts about her filmmaking father, “He’s well known outside, but to me he’s completely different.  People have no idea.  People admire my dad because of his image as a film director.”  Ms. Kim perceptively responds, “We’re all different when we go out, we’re different inside and outside.  Maybe the person he is when he’s outside is more genuine.”

If, as Jeong-su suggests, you cannot get the whole picture of a person like her father merely from watching his films, then the same is likely to be true of Hong.  While his films are intimate, loosely autobiographical portraits of the director, they are also inevitably oblique, distorted, and incomplete, becoming more experimental of late, as the narrative advances with almost imperceptible variations, leaving viewers to make of it what they will, where there is always drunkenness and people who smoke excessively.  The second chapter takes place on the second floor where Byung-soo and Ms. Kim dine in the tiny restaurant with the cook, Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi), a former painter who admires his films, informing him, “There’s a lot of talking in your films, but the dialogue never rubs me the wrong way,” explaining further that she finds them laugh out loud funny, and easy to drink to, yet because they’re so talky, “They make me feel less lonely.”  Byung-soo sadly informs them that his new oversees project that he had been working on for the last year was just rejected by his investors three weeks before shooting was set to begin, claiming films spend so much money on needless things, that it’s all about the money to them instead of making the best film, as they will never understand true artistic vision, thinking it’s all such a waste, that it’s a business model destined to fail.  This failure is mirrored by Ms. Kim acknowledging that Jeong-su was hired as her apprentice, but she left suddenly without a word before the first month had passed, with reverberations spreading like waves, as now the father and daughter are no longer on speaking terms.  These incidents reveal the temporality of things, like the changing seasons, where our understanding of the things that matter to us require viewpoint shifts and quick adaptation.  The more they drink a more palpable attraction builds between Byung-soo and Sun-hee, exchanging mutual admiration, and they remain together in the third chapter, with Byung-soo moving in to the third floor with her, but by now he’s experiencing health issues, growing concerned about his diet, trying to eliminate meat and eat healthier.  Sun-hee cares for him and at first they seem happy together, but there are signs that something is not right.  The ceiling is leaking (like something out of Tsai Ming-liang), yet their landlord, Ms. Kim, doesn’t appear concerned.  While she once salivated at the opportunity of such an esteemed artist living in her building, but Byung-soo’s career has taken a nosedive, apparently affecting his health, and Ms. Kim now feels burdened by his presence, routinely entering without permission, or opening his mail, and only grows more pathetic over time.  What was once a charming space now feels oppressive and claustrophobic, with the world closing in.  As he scales the building, floor by floor, story by story, we see a director age and become unwell, curling up in bed in a fetal position, where a a voiceover incident takes place in his head that may take place in the future or may be pure fantasy, as Byung-soo now starts to think he’d be better off alone, dreaming of making films on Jeju Island.

Next time we see him, he is living in an artist’s studio on the rooftop floor upstairs with yet another woman, Ji-young, (Cho Yun-hee), an emotionally supportive and motherly real estate agent who brings meat to grill and soju to drink, while also getting wild ginseng root preserved in honey, valued for their medicinal properties, which she offers to heal whatever is ailing him.  They eat on the outdoor balcony with a view overlooking the city, a quality that initially attracted the director to choosing this building to live, as it definitely has an aesthetic quality that would be pleasing to any artist.  Byung-soo has aged significantly, though we have no idea how much time has passed.  There are several moments when viewers can’t tell if Byung-soo is dreaming or if it is real, as scenes are narrated as he sleeps, or a text is dictated in his head as it is being composed.  In a carry-over from the earlier chapter, the roof still leaks and the toilet does not work, creating a sizable problem, yet all that seems to matter to Ms. Kim is that he changed the password to his electric door entry keypad (a familiar sound we keep hearing), as she took such great pride that the previous tenant kept his door unlocked.  Using structure as a focal point, each new chapter adds a deeper, more personal layer to the multi-talented artist who oversees nearly every aspect of its production, with echoes of multiple meanings where people connect or not with one another, reflective of the director’s own understanding, his desire, his empathy, and his curiosity, which sometimes provokes anger, regret, and rejection.  Time and time again, Hong uses a certain familiarity with his stable of actors in combination with the film’s plot device to bring out deeper, underlying aspects of the story, with an absence of any explanation or character psychology.  Byung-soo is, after all, a film director, so the unearthed revelations about him, as conversations move toward discussions of fandom, legacy, image, perception, or craft, lead to indications or clues about Hong’s true feelings on the subjects.  This is true about all his films going back to the mid 90’s, where there is virtually no beginning and no end to the list of possible entry points into the auteur’s filmography, as it really doesn’t matter, as each can stand on its own, yet all his films exist in conversation with one another, where it helps to be well-versed in the Hong Sang-soo aesthetic to appreciate what this film is doing, as it retraces where he’s been and offers insight into where he’s heading.  It doesn’t have the quirky fun of another film that lets the imagination go wild in imagining what transpires in the room of a house, that becomes a writing exercise in François Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), which is more brilliantly inventive, instead this is more subdued, elusive, and ambiguously hard to read, where it’s remarkable what you can do in a small space, though nothing of any real interest happens, filling the spaces with an outpouring of everyday details spanning art, love, career, religion, dietary decisions, and home renovations, but it represents a tender journey through different stages of the director’s life with an open-ended honesty that is uniquely this artist’s own.