Colin Marshall

Four films by Sangsoo Hong

Sangsoo Hong¹, the latest addition to my stable of most favored filmmakers, had an eight-film retrospective at LACMA over the last two weekends. I considered it an imperitave — nay, my duty — to attend. Or at least to attend one of the weekends — hey, repeatedly renting cars can get pricey! — which served up four pictures, three of which aren't available on North American DVD.

Besides providing an opportunity to test and slightly bolster my understanding of the Korean language, the screenings gave me what amounted to a shot of pure cinematic narcotic. I knew, going in, that it'd be the good stuff, but eight hours of unadulterated, theatrically-viewed Hong helped me gain some understanding of what, specifically, I like about the man's work.

First and foremost is his visual aesthetic, which usually comes down to "keep it simple." He tends to compose scenes in single shots, two or three in bolder moments. It wasn't until I closely watched a few filmmakers do this (Béla Tarr being another notable practitioner) that I realized just how irritating, consciously or subconsciously, I find the constant cutting that goes on in most movies. When I watch one of Hong's trios of drunken, red-faced Koreans sitting around a table and venting their semi-coherent frustrations, I'm actually seeing it — the setup, the performances, the pacing, the build — rather than seeing it chopped into fifty different bits originally shot over a week's time.

Second is his structuralism. By this I don't mean alignment with any intellectual fads, but a tendency to work out his projects' structures first and go from there. Other filmmakers might slap together an ad hoc structure to acommodate a story; Hong builds story around, or into, structure. As he's often quoted as saying, "People tell me that I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up."

Subpoint: it must be said that I also appreciate his process-orientation. During the Q&A that finished the screenings, he described his adherence to his method of commencing photography with only a treatment in hand, spending exactly one hour each morning of the shoot composing the day's dialogue. I've started to believe that effectively imposing structures, processes and procetures on oneself to work within speeds the creative process. Can Hong's having racked up nine films in thirteen years be a coincidence?

Third is his willingness to probe restrained thematic territory from many angles. Hong's territory, as he's thus far staked it out, would seem comically limited: modern-day Korean creative types in their 20s and 30s smoke, drink, fall gracelessly into bed and brew half-assed solutions to their problems both pedestrian and existential. As dry a well as this sounds, he's gone to it nine times now and always come back with something fresh, intriguing, funny and pretty damn genreless. Outline his films and they sound just like what you'd call "romantic comedies," but their dozens of sharp angles would never, no matter the force, fit into that peghole. In many ways, I regard Hong's filmography as one big movie, each separate release its own distinctive chapter.

In Hong's second film, 1998's The Power of Kangwon Province, Jisook, a college student, and Sang-kwon, a married professor call their affair quits and both embark, separately and unbeknownst to one another, on head-clearing mini-vacations to the scenic northerly province of Kangwon. The film tells their geographically overlapping tales in parallel — first Jisook's, then Sang-kwon's — with a few interesting (and mostly non-contrived) points of connection.

From what I've read, this movie firmly established Hong's prevaling style: one-shot scenes, retreats into nature and distant towns, soused gatherings around tables piled with empty soju bottles and the most unromanticized sex scenes ever. (I haven't seen his first picture, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, but I hear it's not half as developed.) Lots of Hong fans ("Hongheads"?) call Kangwon Province their favorite, and while it's clearly a strong entry, I admit to having trouble rank-ordering his work. But it's definitely in the running.

2002's Turning Gate, Hong's fourth film (the third being Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), also sits on my personal top tier. It earns most of that status by virtue of its humor alone. In response to several intractable personal dilemmas, protagonist and frustrated actor Gyung-soo repeatedly trots out the semi-meaningless phrase "I know it's hard being human, but let's not turn into monsters, okay?", parting words with which his previous (and hardly less pathetic) director shooed him away. A flighty dancer with whom Gyung-soo briefly grows enamored performs a strange compressed routine of the world's dance styles. A bunch of people pile into a van for a day trip, only to immediately slam a girl's fingers in the door; everything, from the industrious beginning to the clumsy, halting abrupt end, plays out in one high-angle wide shot. "How do you like my moves?" Gyung-soo keeps demanding throughout one of Hong's trademark unsexy sex scenes.

Hong uses a symmetric, repetitive structure here, emphasizing Gyung-soo's tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again in whatever arena he happens to enter. Hongheads will recognize this as the predominant trait of the oeuvre's males: they're stubborn, buffoonish, uncommunicative, impulsive. But they also try their damndest to snatch at the closest source of dignity. Gyung-soo tries, he really does, but he can never quite become the person others want him to be, whether those others be his audiences, his directors or the two women he fumblingly romances.

(Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot once compared Turning Gate to Garden State. I haven't seen the latter film, though plenty of friends have told me I wouldn't like it.)

Even Hongheads appear to regard 2005's Tale of Cinema, Hong's sixth movie (number five being the oft- and unfairly maligned Woman is the Future of Man), as difficult to properly judge. A lesser blogger than I would write "spoilers ahead," I suppose, but here goes: the film pulls a switcheroo at the halfway point, revealing the melodrama onscreen to be a short film within the larger, "real" film. This is welcome, since the inner movie ends with its sorrow-filled teen protagonist rushing to a rooftop shouting "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

The screening turns out to be one in a series honoring its director, who's hospitalized and maybe on his deathbed. Or maybe not. In attendance is Yeong-shil, the actress who portrayed the chaste love interest/unsuccessful suicide pact member in the film-within-the-film, and Tong-su, an old (and less successful) film school buddy of the director's. Tong-su grows fixated on both the movie and its lead actress, approaching her until they both end up in one of Hong's unsexy sexes. (The best of them, for my money, though I'm not quite sure why.) Complications ensue.

From frame one, it's clear something's up. To take the most startling quality, the cinematography's full of zooms! Hong seriously breaks loose with the lens lever, and while the result doesn't look "better" than the static shots of Tale's predecessors — "zoom is crappy" remains my aesthetic position — the change of look and feel fascinates. Also contributing to that is the use of way more music cues than usual. At this point, a Honghead-in-training would be well used to hearing a melody at the very beginning and the very end — maybe. These bells and whistles aren't just the tropes of the short film, either; they continue through all the action.

The relative terms "simple," "fun" and "light" might — and have been used to — accurately describe the picture, but it also seems to have disappointed more than a few diehard Hongheads. I suspect there's more complexity behind its brief, sub-90m length and constant goofiness than meets the eye, but I'd also recommend it as an introductory, gateway doseage of Hong's work. That is, I would if it were available on domestic DVD.

As yet Hong's ninth and most recent release, 2008's Night and Day (which was proceeded by 2006's Woman on the Beach also happens to be his most ambitious. Not that you'd know it by Hong's own introduction: "This film is quite long, two hours and 25 minutes," he muttered before the screening. "I hope you find something good in it."

After getting busted smoking pot with a bunch of foreign exchange students, fortyish painter Seong-nam flees to France, far from the reach of Korea's harsh drug laws. Flopping down in a well-known Korean-owned boarding house, the bumbling non-Francophone wanders the city, spends the last of his money and falls in with three fellow artists, women, though even the plaigarist among them produces a lot more than Seong-nam does. Each night he tearfully phones his wife back in Seoul, where it's day. (Geddit?)

Like most Hong men, Seong-nam's full-bore bullshitting can't quite stand up to the harsh glare of the womenfolk. Here, it's for some reason even more hilarious than usual, possibly thanks to the transportation to a foreign land that renders him even more ineffectual and uncomprehending than he would've been in Korea. Not that he escapes the homeland's concerns entirely: he totally freaks, for example, after happening upon a North Korean student at a party, almost instantaneously demanding to know his opinion of the Great Leader and Eternal President. "I just met a North Korean!" he exclaims to himself. "What do I do? Should I tell the consulate?" He later squares matters by his usual method: arm-wrestling.

My immediate impression of Night and Day is that it simply has a lot more stuff than its antecedents. Hong is correct, predictably, that it runs two hours, 25 minutes, but his hope that I find "something" good in it proved too humble. The film's diaristic style — it depicts a small-to-medium scrap of each of Seong-nam's many days in Paris — creates, bit by discrete bit, a sketch of a displaced, disoriented life. It doesn't hurt that the device affords opportunity for as many laughs as Turning Gate. I'll never stop chuckling at the cut straight from Seong-nam's deer-in-the-headlights stare at one of his ladyfriends' demands to know his definition of art to the next day's title card. And what have I learned above all else about Sangsoo Hong's cinema? It's hilarious when people cry their eyes out. No greater master of the comedic weep shall ever live.

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¹ Up to this point in my effort to grasp Korean language and culture, I've assumed that every romanized Korean name consists of two syllables separated by a hyphen. Apparently it's a matter of choice, as Hong is known to prefer "Sangsoo" to "Sang-soo". As for the non-Asian name order, that's my own quirk; when I speak and write in the Anglosphere deliberately putting Asian surnames first, I feel like the vaguely slimy weenie who, presented a fork at a Chinese restaurant, irritatedly demands chopsticks.

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Sang-soo Hong, 2000)

Stylus magazine once ran a profile of Sang-soo Hong, which opens as follows:

As a burgeoning filmgoer, I once idealized the perfect film as a completed jigsaw puzzle, where every piece fit, ripe for savoring. But there was a turning point where looseness became a virtue, rigidity became a vice, and holistic perfection was an oxymoron. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine a L’age D’or without its faux-documentary facade, an Eraserhead without gurgling chickens, a Mouchette without bumper cars, meaning without any sign of joy. There is a reluctant moment akin to pubescence in auteurist cinephilia, when every glance, every word, every color becomes a conscious choice, rather than an inevitable constituent. This is why the term “auteur theory” has always struck me as overly hesitant: how can the fruit of quantifiable decision-making be theoretical?

The author's experience mirrors my own, and our dual appreciations of Hong probably spring from a similar root. Nothing in his movies feels accidental, or at least nothing in them feels as if it was included accidentally. From what I understand, Hong is actually a skilled cultivator and user of accident — reputedly getting his actors drunk both in advance of and during shoots may have something to do with this — and he presents the fruits of his accidents only after meticulous selection and arrangement.

Not that I want to front like one of those process-not-product wonks — after all, if you don't have the product, the process doesn't mean dick — but I'm enamored of Sang-soo Hong's processes. I'm obviously into the products as well, as you'd gather from even a casual browsing of this journal's recent posts, but the more I learn about the way he works, the more I admire it. What initially grabbed me was his unsual attention toward structure. A refreshingly direct quote of his is often refrenced: "People tell me that I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up." Structure seems an underused starting point for cinema, although it might be argued that it's actually the most common starting point in that screenwriters' first order of business is often to stick themselves with the old three-act stricture, as it were. While it's served certain recent films, especially Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, quite well, I wonder if it's not high time to give the three-act a semi-dignified retirement. Hong actively works to bring this about.

Another element of the Hong method that I hold in increasingly high esteem is his insistence on shooting in sequence. Pen-ek Ratanaruang did the same in Last Life in the Universe, to astonishingly effective results. In both director's films, this appears to be another way to harness chance: when the actors and the other creators know that what's previously happened on the set is also what's previously happened on film, they can more confidently improvise and allow unscripted developments to evolve into essential components, allowing the whole project to more easily change for the better. In an interview with Cinema Scope, Hong describes incorporating into the work his responses to the locations and actors:

If I chose a different actress or actor, I might have come up with a different ending. I have some of the details, and then I shoot this person, and my response to this person and what she gives me makes up the next day’s storyline. One important factor contributing to that particular ending is who she is in real life. If you have too much conceptualization, the options in terms of where you get details are restrained, because of this strong outline. Of course we need some kind of outline, but I really like to pick up details from other places beyond the main dramatic points. For me, those dramatic points are not the centre. It’s up to you how you connect them. The details come from an unusual place and make a pattern, but patterns don’t necessarily have a symbolic meaning. That’s not my intention. My job is just to make a complex pattern so people can feel something that is alive. I can think of a person [points at a woman] — let’s say you and I met her and after two hours you can talk about her this way and I can talk about her that way. Because she is a living being, we can say different things about her. That’s as far as I want to go, rather than telling you what to feel.

Were I to write a short manifesto laying out the nature of excellence in modern film, I could hardly do better than that.

By virtue of its own distinctive structure, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors takes events presumably shot in sequence and shuffles them into a nonlinear chronology from two individual perspectives. Of these, the main event is the deflowering of screenwriter and titular virgin Soo-jung by wealthy-ish rake Jae-hoon. Hong chops the coupling itself and the leadup to it into fourteen chapters, or seven from Soo-jung's perspective and seven from Jae-hoon's. The latter has more of a rom-com feel, if cinema stylized so unlike a rom-com can be deemed rom-commy at all. The former is imbued with more of what I would call a claustrophobic ominousness.

This sounds, I realize, a bit like the makings of one of those tiresome he said/she said affairs: "Hey guys, women think like this, but men think like this!" Despite his avowed thematic interest in memory and this subject matter's easy suitability for storytelling via unreliable memories, Hong eschews such obvious techniques. Soo-jung and Jae-hoon's perspectives depict, for the most part, the same events; much dialogue is echoed between the halves. The movie expresses variety of perception much more subtly, with light, blocking and camera placement; the differences lie in what's revealed. Any and all incongruities are conveyed purely cinematically. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is a film that could never be a book. And it certainly ain't no jigsaw puzzle, that's for damn sure.

Woman is the Future of Man (Sang-soo Hong, 2004)

So it's settled: Sang-soo Hong is officially one of my favorite working filmmakers, Korean or otherwise. Despite not having much in the way of a cinematic tradition, Korea¹ has become perhaps the most exciting film country going. Even relatively high-profile releases like Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, Joon-ho Bong's The Host and Ki-duk Kim's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring transcend their genres somewhat and do a fine aesthetic job of it all the while. But those movies tended to trade, to varying degrees, on spectacle and the exotic, and in those qualities lay their weaknesses. In the first two films of his that I've watched — the previous being Woman on the Beach — Hong retains all the refreshing qualities of modern Korean film and excises, as it were, the excesses, using materials drawn from life and trimming end results down to their barest elements. If there's a reliable formula to win my cinematic love these days, that's it.

Like (the more recent) Woman on the Beach, Woman is the Future of Man revolves around a male-male-female trio of nominally artistic late-twenty/early-thirtysomethings: that movie has a filmmaker, a production designer and a composer; this one has another filmmaker, an art professor and a painter. Hun-joon the filmmaker and Mun-ho the art professor, having celebrated the former's return from an extended stay in the States by — what else? — pounding bottle after bottle of soju at a café, decide it would be a fine idea to go visit the girl, a painter named Sun-hwa, whom they both, at one point or another, left behind. Because these two are men in line with what appears to be a Sang-soo Hong tradition, they're disoriented bundles of excuses, ex post facto rationalizations, flimsy false sincerity and sheer ineptitude, and thus their visit to the former ladyfriend turns out to be just about as healthy and productive as you'd expect.

Seeing these two films and reading descriptions of Hong's others lead me to believe that he works within a narrow subject band, but man oh man, does he work within it. Seeming fully to grasp Ebert's dictum that a film is not about what it is about but how it is about it, he minimizes the focus on the what and maximizes the focus on the how, sometimes going so far as to announce events in advance, thus freeing the audience of the burden of that what-happens-next? vigilance that sucks attention away from the other elements. In this film as well (apparently) as in his wider body of work, Hong uses patterns, cycles, repetition and a to enormous advantage, creating richness out of small-scale actions, interactions and conversations visited and revisited like themes echoed and varied throughout a piece of music. There's a certain kind of cinematic pointillism at work here, taking countless little (sometimes only loosely related) bits and pieces of life as you'd watch or hear if from the other side of a park or restaurant — one friend offering another the first walk through untouched snow, in this case, or a momentary outburst due to another's "American-style" hugging of one's wife, or the confrontation by a student of his teacher holding drunken court — and reassembling them into an image that, viewed, from two different distances, can be appreciated on two different scales.² What you notice in the whole, you don't notice in the part; what you notice in the part, you don't notice in the whole.

Perhaps it's best to quote Hong himself on his creative process:

I start with a very ordinary, banal situation, and this situation usually has something in it that makes me feel strongly. It's a stereotypical feeling, but very strong. I have this desire to look at it... perhaps it's a blind feeling. I put it on the table, and I look at it. I open up, and these pieces surface. They are not related, they conflict with each other. But I try to find a pattern that makes all these pieces fit into one.

Many complaints about Woman is the Future of Man's lack of a "payoff" float around the tubes, and indeed, that's just the sort of convention to which mediocre screenwriters enslave themselves. I say it's an indication of Hong's unusual skill: he grasps a great many things about cinema, but his most important understanding is that he's making films, not slot machines. What filmmaker couldn't stand to be reminded of that?

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¹ Some insist on calling it "South Korea", but really, isn't it so much easier to call the south "Korea" and the north "North Korea"? It's just like "Virginia" and "West Virginia": the trick is to stay out of the one with the cardinal direction.

² Hong also, so I hear, employs a great deal of wordplay and general verbal wit, which gives me something to look forward to fifty years from now when I have finally gotten a handle on the Korean language.

Shiri (Kang Je-Gyu, 1999)

Fixing to start a second war that will somehow lead to reunification, a team of North Korean operatives sneaks into the South to steal an experimental explosive and waste a North-South exhibition soccer game with it. Already long on the trail of that group's best sniper, Southern agents Yu and Lee try their damndest to shut them down.

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Shiri proved once and for all that South Korea can, at least with some Samsung cash, crank out a biggish-budget action movie just like the ones in the States. (As for the North, well, they'll always have Pulgasari.) Now, when I say "just like the ones in the States," I mean just like them; the film is positively strewn with lame action clichés. Here are just the ones off the top of my head:

• The Bruce Willis Leap, that is to say, jumping just ahead of a huge explosion
• Multiple counting-down red LEDs, one of which is stopped with just five seconds to spare
• "I will tell you the location of each bomb exactly 30 minutes before its detonation"
• Avenging one's dead partner
• Image enhance
• The villiain who reveals his Big Plan with the hero at gunpoint
• Countless bullets exchanged from across rooms conveniently filled with shieldlike objects

Then again, it's also got a handful of elements that feel distinctly Korean, or at least unusual: witness the lines about eating roots and bark, or the guy in a Mexican standoff with his own fiancée.

As an homage to the American-made action film, Shiri is almost too faithful. It was as if I'd seen almost everything in it before, and I'm not even an action movie connoisseur; in fact, this film reminded me of how surprisingly tired I am of the genre's tropes. Take the fire fights to which I alluded at the end of the above list. Despite thousands of rounds expelled, they aren't too thrilling. One side fires. Then the other side fires. Then the first side fires back. Such an exchange, for some reason, takes like forty cuts, each one reducing the (negligible) excitement with which the fight started.

I sound like I'm ragging on the movie, but it's not as bad as all that. It's well-executed, sure, but the producers' concern with putting money onscreen dulled the edge. The Politics of Korean Culture class I'm sitting in on assigned both Shiri and Chan-Wook Park's Joint Security Area, presumably because they're both big hits that deal with Korea's division. If you find yourself deciding between the two, rush down JSA without hesitation and give Shiri a pass, unless of course you're a Korean cinema completist like me.

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5. Bullets fired are subject to rapidly diminishing marginal impact. One bullet fired in a film is a pivotal event. A thousand bullets fired are just so much noise.