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2015｜121 MIN | Drama
DIRECTOR HONG Sang-soo
CAST JUNG Jae-young, KIM Min-hee, KO Asung, YU Jun-sang
RELEASE DATE September 24, 2015
CONTACT Finecut
Tel : +82 2 569 8777
Fax : +82 2 569 6662
Email : cineinfo@finecut.co.kr

 

20 years into his career acclaimed filmmaker HONG Sang-soo returns with his 17th feature and picked up his biggest accolade to date, after becoming the first Korean filmmaker to scoop up the coveted Golden Leopard prize at the Locarno International Film Festival with Right Now, Wrong Then. The film marks not only a high point for him, but also for his key stars, as mainstream actor JUNG Jae-young received the Best Actor award at the same event and KIM Min-hee has been drawing strong notices for her turn alongside him.

 

In HONG’s latest film, JUNG incarnates an independent filmmaker who travels to Suwon, a satellite city south of the Seoul metropolis, to attend a screening and Q&A session of one of his films. He arrives a day early and visits a local temple, where he meets a beguiling young artist whom he invites to coffee. They spend the day together and later have dinner with some of her friends, progressively getting drunker as the night wears on. The next day, accompanied by a throbbing hangover, the filmmaker takes part in his film festival presentation.

 

Following the first hour of the narrative, the same basic events are replayed with minor but increasingly significant modifications, much like the split structure of HONG’s earlier black and white film Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000). Teasing out meaning with his slight variations, HONG’s attention to the smallest details turns the film into a large emotional canvas where a director considers his value as an artist and looks back on ups and downs of his personal life.

 

Known for his saturnine characters in commercial works such as Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) and Castaway on the Moon (2009), JUNG teams up with HONG for the second time, following Our Sunhi, which netted the cineaste the Silver Leopard for Best Director at Locarno in 2013. Marking her first appearance in a HONG film is KIM, who has grown tremendously in recent years, delivering strong turns in Helpless (2012) and Very Ordinary Couple (2013), and who will next be seen in PARK Chan-wook’s colonial era thriller Fingersmith next year. Also in the cast are frequent HONG acolyte YU Jun-sang, who last teamed up with the filmmaker in In Another Country (2012), and emerging star KO Asung, from BONG Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013), who also works with the auteur for the first time.