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. 

Oslo Trilogy: Dreams (Drømmer)

 

Director Dag Johan Haugerud

Golden Bear at Berlin

actress Ella Øverbye

lead cast

Oslo Trilogy: Dreams (Drømmer)               B+                                                                   Norway  (110 mi)  2024  d: Dag Johan Haugerud

Thoughts and dreams can be wonderful.  They can contain, look like and be however you like.  As long as you keep them to yourself.  The second you let others in, everything crumbles and changes.     —Johanne (Ella Øverbye)

Different stylistically from the other two sections of the Trilogy, reinforcing the deeply poetic philosophy that this filmmaker has been able to permeate into the work, yet this features a Proustian autobiographical, stream-of-conscious inner narration in a queer story about first love, winner of the Golden Bear as the Best Film at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, a first for a Norwegian film, while also winning the FIPRESCI and Guild Prize, surprisingly turned down by the Cannes Film Festival, with Berlin Jury President Todd Haynes praising the confidence and subversion with which Haugerud explores the drive of love and desire, claiming this is “An intensely compelling story about first love—poignant, witty, and brilliant—as insightful as it is beautifully directed and performed.  One of the few films everyone on the Berlin Film Festival jury agreed on… so we gave it the biggest prize!”  Easily the most wordy film of the Trilogy, it approaches the subject differently, almost from a feminist and literary point of view, with an omniscient narrator poetically describing her inner thoughts throughout the entire film, drawing us into her character, as impressionable 17-year old high school student Johanne (Ella Øverbye, appearing in Haugerud’s earlier film BARN, or BEWARE OF CHILDREN, at the age of 11 in 2019, wanting to write a part for her) develops a near obsessional crush on her new French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu, also appearing in the earlier film BARN), the only black woman in a sea of bourgeois whites, who exhibits a kind of sensual flair for freedom that sets her apart from the other adults in the room, where she quite literally can’t stop thinking about her, developing an infatuation that is painfully relatable.  As if to preserve her feelings, she starts writing her thoughts down in a written compilation of her emotions of what she’s experiencing, documenting with brutal honesty the intimate details of what she’s going through in a memoir, becoming a first love, coming-of-age story with a queer subtext.  Seemingly more mature and self-restrained than the other students around her, the filmmaker isolates Johanne from everyone else, often found alone with her thoughts, confused, innocent, and vulnerable, with no one else to reach out to, with complicated feelings that range from excitement and exhilaration to confusion and frustration, so she pours them out in a vivid confession to her diary, where first love is not like any other love, distinctly unique, and a stark reminder of something we will never experience again.  The other two films of the Trilogy are told from the perspective of adult people who doubt love, or despair from it, who imagine it does or does not exist in their lives, until unexpected things happen in the middle of their everyday routines, while this film goes back to the origins of love, offering a more subjective presentation of what Johanne is feeling.  Dealing with the complexity of human relationships, sexuality, and social norms, this is driven by a female-dominated cast and explores coming-of-age, sexuality and the intensity of first love, intergenerational relationships, while accentuating the importance of memory through writing, featuring many scenes filmed with the protagonist sitting next to a window, where the outdoors never intrudes, but may as well be worlds apart, in a fragmented narrative that only straightens out and becomes more linear near the end.

Opening with an inner monologue where the protagonist literally has her head in the clouds, revealing the impermanence and dreamlike patterns of drifting clouds, feeling as if the body and soul are separated, exposing the fragility of the human experience, yet placing us in the mindset of a teenage girl ruminating over the complexities of her young life, with the understanding of how easily her thoughts and dreams could instantly be washed away.  This cuts to an impressionistic dance class sequence of young girls set to the music of Anna Berg’s Pyr YouTube (2:07), as viewers have not yet placed what body the voice is attached to, but a short conversation afterwards connects the dots, as we are suddenly immersed into the adolescent world of Johanne, an avid reader, confessing “I read to have a place to go.  And to arrive at myself,” with discoveries awaiting her at every turn, fueled only by her own curiosity.  The only segment of the Trilogy with a single protagonist, as the others feature two or more characters, the narrative structure is complex, written solely by Haugerud, jumping back and forth in time, yet what instantly stands out is that this inner narration is juxtaposed against real moments in her life, creating an ever-shifting mosaic in time, as we see the world she lives in while hearing her most intimate thoughts about what it means to her, creating this duality effect, living and observing at the same time, which is the perspective of a writer.  As she sits on a bench in the darkness afterwards, a recurring image shot through a green filter, we get a series of flashbacks, starting with an Easter holiday trip to her grandmother’s cabin with her mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp) and grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen, also appearing in BARN), bringing along a friend, but what she really discovers is a book, French writer Janine Boissard’s 1979 novel L’esprit de Famille, revealing the relationship between a 16-year-old girl and a much older adult artist, which makes an explosive impression, awakening the first explorations of her sexuality, leaving her with a sense of longing.  There’s a near total absence of men in the movie, completely altering the perspective, especially for a film directed by a man, yet the performance by Øverbye is subtle, though completely in sync with the inner narration, always conveyed with vulnerability and tenderness, with her life still ahead of her, the youngest protagonist and arguably the most appealing character in the entire Trilogy, displaying a surprising amount of emotional intensity with striking accuracy, as she astutely reads the environment around her, never moving too quicky, allowing things to seep in and be deeply felt and understood, which she eloquently shares with us.  Placed in context with the rest of the Trilogy, viewed in this order—Sex, Love, Dreams—what begins as a study in middle-aged male ego transforms into a wholly female perspective in the second, finally moving backwards in time to an exploration of adolescent love, the place where it all began for most of us.

Like a game of hide and seek, Johanne becomes obsessed with following her French teacher, hoping to run into her, as if that is the only thing that matters in the entire world, where the intensity hits her like a ton of bricks.  This film recalls those idealized sensations of youth, where your heart is aflutter at the thought of these new sensations, which completely dominate her world.  She conjures up excuses to meet and run into her, eventually finding out where she lives, intent on confessing her love, and then knocking on the door, breaking down in tears before inventing some complaints about the treatment of her fellow students, making her feel stupid, finally settling on the pretext of wanting to learn how to knit, which is a vital part of Nordic identity, deeply integrated into the culture, with nearly half of all Norwegian women knitting regularly, where the intense fetishization of knitting and yarn, even the wool sweaters they’re wearing, and oversized scarves, is particularly striking, yet it’s a harmless notion that doesn’t send red flags, but allows her to comfortably share the same warm and intimate space.  This is the place where she became the person she always wanted to be, perhaps best expressed by watching tea leaves expand in hot water, like feelings of desire growing stronger, as we hear the swelling sounds of Anna Berg’s music, Ilith YouTube (2:24), blurring the lines between dreams and reality, but she keeps those thoughts to herself, keeping the visits ambiguously cordial.  Having a crush on someone unattainable or forbidden feels almost like a rite of passage for a teenage girl, especially those who are queer, but Johanne makes no attempt to define her sexuality or identity, she’s simply in the throes of love, where every waking hour is spent dreaming of the one you love, while sleep is a rush of sexual wish fulfillment, where the imagination runs wild just imagining what it would be like to lie naked next to her, where her whole body felt the rush of a new sensation.  There is no question that this relationship crosses a moral line, but the entire experience exists largely in her own imagination, ending just as abruptly as it began, as in her final visit another woman is suddenly there, Frøydis (Ingrid Giæver), leaving her feeling isolated, invisible, and unwanted, allowing her to quietly escape.  Growing moody and distanced afterwards, her friends realize a sudden change, reaching out to offer self-help apps for people in difficult situations, but she remains quietly aloof.  It was only in hindsight that she realized what she experienced was love.  Overwhelmed by the need to tell someone, she decides to share what she’d written with her grandmother, who is more open-minded than her more cautious mother, a poet with an entire wall devoted to books.  But as soon as she allows her to read what she’d written, it felt different, as if she ruined it all, changing it in unexpected and unimaginable ways, as she left herself open to be judged by others.  Written as a way to hold on to these memories before they disappear into thin air, others may not see it that way, and bring their own life experiences into it.  While the musical score is written by Anna Berg, two songs that stand out are attributed to Peder Capjon Kjellsby, Motzfeldtsgate kort YouTube (2:19) and Motzfeldtsgate lang YouTube (3:53), which are reflections of the street she takes to Johanna’s apartment, taking us through the almost futuristic new-build areas that were created in the middle of the city.      

This extends an earlier theme that began in Oslo Trilogy: Sex, revealing how innermost thoughts, like those of an artist, Haugerud for example, take on a life of their own once introduced to others, completely losing control of their original narrative.  Accordingly, the film expands to the perspectives of her mother and grandmother, who each read what she’s written with differing reactions, initially shocked by its erotic content, with Kristin growing defensive, wondering if her daughter has been abused, while Karin sees potential in the writing, finding it incisive and extremely well-written, wondering if it can be expanded into a book.  While it remains ambiguously open to interpretation, each wonders how much actually happened and how much exists entirely in her imagination.  This sheds light into their own relationship, sparking a debate about the clashing of generational principles, as they argue about, of all things, Adrian Lyne’s FLASHDANCE (1983), which purports to be a feminist view about a female welder in a working class neighborhood who is also a featured dancer by night, but ends up reinforcing sexist stereotypes by objectifying her beauty and sexual allure through a traditional male gaze.  Kristin found it liberating and fun, even empowering when she first viewed it around the age of 10, but her mother insisted it was garbage, and would never let her actually enjoy it.  This is probably the last movie you would ever expect to be discussed in this film, but it’s wildly amusing, as they each have a such a radically different take on the subject, while also offering their own feminist take on the Brontë sisters.  No longer alarmed by her initial suspicions, with her mother describing it as a “queer awakening,” both soon see that the memoir has literary potential, believing it resonates universally and deserves to be published.  While neither one is fazed by the revelations of queer desire, both see themselves in what she’s written, connecting back to their own sexual choices they made, recalling the overwhelming strengths and trauma of first love, remembered with such reverence.  The three women each have their own individual experiences and opinions about desire, freedom, empowerment, and responsibility, none of which are fixed and sometimes contradict each other.  Aside from love, the story also explores how sexual desire can be used to justify certain actions toward others and how even the delicate, deeply personal experience of a crush can be shared with the world, as first love is a transformative experience that changes everything, intense and all-consuming, shockingly exciting, untouched by logic or experience, yet confusing, like an unstoppable force that grabs hold of you and seemingly never lets go.  There are time shifts and recurring images throughout the film, including dreamlike sequences, with the camera constantly traveling through winding staircases, including a former ski jump (the opening image) turned into a staircase by the river in Oslo, and one that seemingly reaches endlessly towards the sky, like a biblical Jacob’s Ladder.  Beautifully shot by Cecilie Semec, this is essentially a human story about a girl who discovers a new adventure that will inevitably change her life, as ultimately what she discovers is a better sense of herself, losing the narration altogether as she is interestingly seen sparring with her psychologist, Lars Jacob Holm, becoming yet another person interpreting her story, where the entire film may, in fact, be flashbacks of Johanne relating her personal experiences to him during their sessions together, with a surprising twist at the end, realized through a profoundly different yet intensely realized personal journey.