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. 

Rebuilding

 

Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman

director with Kali Reis and Josh O'Connor

actress Kali Reis

REBUILDING           B+                                                                                                        USA  (96 mi)  2025  d: Max Walker-Silverman

Film is an act of imagination.  It is the bright light in a dark room.  So I made this film because only through imagining a better world can we hope for one.  And only through hoping for a better world can we fight for one.  I made this film because if loss must be an ongoing ingredient of our lives, as it must, then care and healing and rebirth must be, too.                    —Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman, “Rebuilding” Reminds Us to Seek the Balm of Community 

From the maker of 2022 Top Ten List #8 A Love Song, this opens up a window into a rarely seen world in this critically praised, quiet, and empathetic little indie gem starring versatile British actor Josh O’Connor (5 major roles in the last 18 months) as Dusty, a humble Colorado cattle rancher navigating life in a temporary FEMA trailer park (timely in an unfortunate way, coinciding with the real wildfires that devastated parts of Southern California) after his home and extensive ranch territory that have been in his family for generations are completely destroyed by a horrific wildfire that consumes thousands of acres.  Premiering at Sundance in the same year as Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (2025), which this resembles (neither was awarded any prizes), yet that film garnered all the attention, fueled, perhaps by the money from Netflix, causing this film to get lost, flying completely under the radar with no promotional fanfare, though it actually offers greater depth and more profound emotional resiliency.  Delicate and tender, this is the kind of film that only independent American cinema can offer, far more naturalistic than his earlier effort, reminiscent of Chloé Zhao’s 2021 #5 Film of the Year Nomadland (2020) in terms of its depiction of America and its vast panoramic landscapes, accentuating the plight of marginalized people in the wake of tragedy, where sadness and personal struggles are largely overshadowed by the immense presence of the natural world.  O’Connor is excellent in a subdued and understated performance as Dusty, a reserved, overly polite, and grief-stricken man of few words, whose self-reliance and independence seem to have isolated him from others, especially his loved ones, as he’s a man with too much pride to ever ask anyone for help, yet his actions speak loudly, essentially revealing that when you’ve lost everything, what you’ve got left are friends, family, and a surrounding community, who are not to be underestimated, as they mean everything.  Patient and slow-paced, mostly told though Dusty’s perspective, a cowboy who wonders who and what he is if he’s not a rancher, this is a gently humanist story, set in southern Colorado, where it’s times like these that make you revaluate what’s really important in your life, as it may not be the same things that mattered before the fire.  The sheer devastation of losing everything changes things, as you no longer have the comfortable rhythm of your daily support system in place, starting the day milking the cows, bailing hay, feeding the livestock, herding cattle, and mending fences, as the sparse life in a FEMA trailer is totally different, where everything is reduced to the bare essentials.  He thinks he might seek work during the calving season at his cousin’s farm in Montana, 500 miles away, until he realizes how much his daughter is attached to him.  Working with former NYU film school classmates, production designer Juliana Barreto Barreto and co-editor Ramzi Bashour, though his closest collaborator is cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, exquisitely shot in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, the largest alpine valley in the world, where going months without rain make it a tinderbox ready to explode, but we never see the fire, only the aftermath, though we do see an opening abstract montage of floating embers carried by the winds.  Beautifully establishing a not so ordinary sense of place, with a sparse script written by the Telluride native director featuring dialogue that sounds organic, as there are no villains, and there’s not an ounce of melodrama, accentuating the kinds of figures rarely seen in films, as the relationship between humans and nature, between all natural things, must fluctuate, ebb and flow, leaving us open to change, as loss is universal, where sometimes it takes a calamity to realize what we have.  

Deeply rooted in the human experience, based on his own personal ordeal of watching his grandmother’s house burn down in a wildfire in 2020, this American cowboy movie is a character and performance-driven film featuring a Greek chorus collection of offbeat characters driven from their homes, “not real neighbors,” as described by Dusty, where these inhabitants from closely assembled trailers could be anybody, where the initial focus is not on them but on Dusty reconnecting with his family, including his firm but fair ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy from Christopher Landon’s Drop, 2025), her strong-willed mother Bess (Amy Madigan), and his estranged 9-year old daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre, an Australian with a perfect American accent), who is mature beyond her years, offering an eye-opening performance, stealing literally every scene she’s in while also winning our hearts in one of the great child performances.  Despite being divorced, they maintain close relations, even though Ruby has moved on to a new husband, Robbie (Sam Engbring), with an openly sensible plan to mutually share raising their daughter.  In a lot of small mountain communities, families are scattered and far away, making it inhospitable for the elderly, and those who move there are often leaving home intentionally, so kids are cared for by a lot of unofficial aunts and uncles.  Natural disasters from floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, tornadoes, and earthquakes are going to be part of our lives forever, where after such staggering loss, things don’t come back as they were, from the places that define us, but are instead reinvented, with this film focusing on the subsequent healing, reminiscent of the much larger scale Amish barn-raising sequence in Peter Weir’s WITNESS (1985), WITNESS Barn Raising Scene MOVIE 1985 YouTube (6:22), which is nothing less than exhilarating.  With no work to keep him busy, this catastrophe opens a window of opportunity for Dusty to reconnect and spend more time with Callie-Rose, bringing her out to the new homesite, where he hasn’t even unpacked the cardboard boxes in his trailer, yet she immediately finds companionship with one of the other kids, as they literally live off a deserted highway in the middle of wide open spaces where no other structure can be seen for miles.  While it’s a primitive environment, with no running water, the closeness of the trailers all huddled together resembles the era of Westerns when wagon trains did the same thing in order to offer protection from Indian attacks.  But here what stands out is that they have no one to rely upon except themselves, responsible for cooking and feeding each other, sharing meals and companionship, helping out with needed home repairs, exploring ideas of home and family, and our memories of both, developing all the attributes of a close-knit community, routinely looking out for one another in a reflection of human decency, discovering deep emotion through simple moments of connection between characters, where authenticity is the film’s greatest strength, a reflection of the prevalent use of non-professionals (everyone but one in the FEMA group).  The initially shy and reticent Dusty seems to hide his eyes under his cowboy hat, bashfully avoiding contact with others, yet still he projects strength, despite everything falling apart underneath him, making a strong impression on his daughter, who has never gotten to spend a lot of time with her Dad and looks up to him perhaps more than she should, REBUILDING I Reborn I Bleecker Street YouTube (2:08), yet she is immediately accepted by the group, no questions asked, making her feel right at home. 

This film is not a disaster movie, but a tender look at humanity’s ability to rebuild through togetherness, a film that is grounded in themes of loss, open skies, and the kinds of people Hollywood often overlooks.  In the minds of this ragtag group of displaced neighbors is just what comes next, as the housing is only temporary, so they’ll have to figure out how to move on to the next step in their lives, which is a concern for everyone, as their lives have been uprooted and placed in limbo, surrounded by the emptiness of a wide-open landscape.  In what resembles the middle of nowhere, completely vulnerable to the elements, they figure out their day-to-day routines, but it’s hard to see beyond that.  Banks refuse to offer loans, as there is nothing left to borrow against, with everything of value destroyed in the fire, where it will be another eight to ten years before his pastureland will again produce enough grass for livestock farming, making it all but impossible to begin again anytime soon.  Needing a phone or computer to process their applications for federal assistance, or for Callie-Rose to do her homework, a library is the only place for these rural residents to access Wi-Fi, with sporadic cars or trucks seen parked nearby, but they close early from funding cuts, so at night Dusty takes Callie-Rose there so she can read books on her tablet while lying in the back of his truck in the parking lot, Rebuilding Exclusive Movie Clip - You Live Here (2025) YouTube (1:01).  Her choice of reading material leans towards the fantastical, allowing her imagination to soar from Scott Emerson’s The Magic Boots, which is beautifully integrated into the social realist aesthetic.  One of the standout scenes is watching the two girls stick the interior walls of the trailer with countless glow-in-the-dark stars, then extinguish the light and sit with an equally astonished Dusty under an endless starry sky, a small gesture that carries enormous emotional weight.  The exquisite acoustic guitar score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, coming from the John Fahey folk roots tradition, figures prominently, like Jake Xerxes Fussell & James Elkington - Mountain Time ... YouTube (2:21), with the John Prine song Kurt Vile - "How Lucky" with John Prine (Official Audio) YouTube (3:23) eloquently infused into the narrative, becoming a sort of theme song for Dusty.  In the end, what matters most are the welcoming personal connections, which only reveal themselves over time, with earth mother Mali (Kali Reis, a mixed Indigenous and Cape Verdean actress, also a former American and World Champion boxer), who lost her husband to the fire, becoming the heart and soul of this new community, taking everyone under her wing, where they’re free to be whoever they choose, including an elderly lesbian couple, a biracial couple, an affable plumber, a barely seen hermit-like man who rarely leaves his trailer, where older men especially drift from self-reliance into solitude, while others are much more socially connected in their day-to-day lives, with Dusty and Callie-Rose not only accepted, but embraced.  The structure of the film slowly builds from an isolated emptiness, seemingly having nothing, to an awareness of why they want to stay, as they feel an inter-generational connection to the land and don’t want to have to start a new life elsewhere, while also exposing recognizable friendships, where they’re all in the same boat, as they come to realize these fragile connections matter.  With no easy answers, this is the kind of film that sneaks up on you, handled with great restraint rather than exploitation, leaving a profound emotional imprint, with a surprising and unexpectedly touching finale that only accentuates the tenuous and fleeting nature of our lives, as healing happens not in isolation, but through shared human connections, where a reimagined future must come from within, becoming a stark meditation on hope and resilience.