Showing on the final day of the Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival (CINDI) was the opening night film, acclaimed Korean art-house director Hong Sang-soo’s THE DAY HE ARRIVES (which debuted at Cannes in May and is getting its first release domestically at the festival). Hong is currently my favorite working director and is easily the most consistent filmmaker, with no below average movies in his filmography. And while that streak continues here, I have to say that THE DAY HE ARRIVES was a disappointment on first viewing. This is certainly a good film, but it also may be Hong’s worst, ranking for me with 2002′s TURNING GATE and 2005′s A TALE OF CINEMA as his least successful attempts. There remains much to admire, but it doesn’t represent the growth of his more recent work, especially last year’s masterpiece OKI’S MOVIE. Of course, given that TURNING GATE and A TALE OF CINEMA are favorites of some of Hong’s critics, my view may end up in the minority. But I thought I’d try to work out both what I felt did and did not work in this effort. (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD)

The plot is familiar to any Hong aficionado: Yoo Seong-jun (played by the nearly identically named Yoo Jun-sang), a temporally retired film director and current film professor living near Daegu, returns to Seoul to visit an old friend, Yeong-ho, and encounters former and/or future lovers along the way. The main aesthetic difference is a return to black and white for the first time since 2000′s THE VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS. There are a large number of repetitions of scenes and dialogue, not unlike that seminal earlier narrative experiment, and an ambiguity, at least on initial viewing, of which sequences (and even characters) are meant as reality and which (if any) are subjective imaginings. Hong has made a career out of this obsessive patterning, and yet again finds inventive ways to make the viewer think and re-think his plots and characters. And probably the best part of the film is the conclusion, with cameos from well-known Korean stars encountering the director as he wonders the streets. The final scene is a brief conversation with an amateur photographer/fan played by the always great Go Hyun-jung (star of Hong’s WOMAN ON THE BEACH and LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL), who takes his picture as the narrative concludes. On the whole, the movie improves as it goes along and the complexity of Hong’s seemingly simple plot is revealed, and it would probably improve on repeat viewing. But my sense of dissatisfaction remains, and I think is related to the central character.

In general, Hong is more dynamic when looking at his female characters or at least in narratives where the female characters have a prominent role. In THE DAY HE ARRIVES, we are primarily focused on the main male character, and this emphasis never really shifts. This was a weakness I found in TURNING GATE as well, and it is more magnified here because the character is nearly farcical in presentation, especially in key early establishing scenes. His quick friendship with and then outburst against a group of young film students and his apologetic breakdown in front of his former lover are played too broadly for comedy, and although they had the desired impact on the audience, I prefer when Hong is more subtle. Usually I enjoy seeing Hong’s films with a local audience and often get more out of the films as a result, but in this case I was more annoyed by the reaction because I didn’t really share the emotion. Perhaps there is more subtly in the language here than in Hong’s other work and that there was something lost in translation, but I think it is more that the over-the-top performance and presentation turned me off. A related problem is that the female characters are not sufficiently interesting and developed, despite the fine effort of the actresses, especially Song Seon-mi (who also played in WOMAN ON THE BEACH). I should also note that this is Hong’s shortest film at 79 minutes, and does not have the conceit of being a series of shorts like the similarly brief OKI’S MOVIE. It thus feels like something is missing, that somehow Hong had trouble making all the pieces fit and had to cut down to a shorter length, unable to complete the characterizations, not unlike the similarly shortened WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN. The result remains intriguing and formally complex but feels more like simply an experiment with narrative rather than a fully developed work. One wonders if the pace Hong has been working at since his move to digital (five features with one in production plus a short in four years compared to seven features in twelve years working on film) is finally starting to catch up to him, especially since that pace is quickening by the year. That said, I eagerly await the next entry in the Hong filmography, which apparently will feature the great French actress Isabelle Huppert as well as THE DAY HE ARRIVES star Yoo Jun-sang and is currently in production.

Not sure if THE DAY HE ARRIVES will get a theatrical run with subtitles here in Korea, but odds are very good it will screen at the Busan festival in October.

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