Based on how much both of us liked Right Now, Wrong Then, I had high hopes for this latest film by its director Hong Sang-soo. It also features the same actress Kim Min-hee as the lead as well as many other familiar faces from the earlier film. Unfortunately neither of us liked this one, finding it self-indulgent and almost incomprehensible.
Young-hee is an actress who goes on an extended visit to a friend in Germany. From their conversation it emerges that she is having an affair with a married man who has promised to come and meet her but she doubts that he will do so. In a later scene, we see that she has returned to South Korea and runs into an acquaintance. He invites her to a cafe owned by some common friends and this eventually turns into a dinner party reuniting some old friends. Over dinner Young-hee becomes drunk and rants about how everyone is unqualified to love, revealing that she has yet to get over the man. Finally she wanders out onto the beach alone, perhaps to reflect on her life.
As with the previous film, this is very much Korean mumblecore so not being able to understand what is going on from the get-go is only to be expected. Unfortunately On the Beach at Night Alone takes it too far as the audience is left in the dark pretty much the entire time. The earlier film worked well because it is almost entirely about two strangers getting to know one another with the audience looking in on the side. Here the characters all know one another and have established relationships that the audience have to infer from the context. This is made even harder by the possibility that this is a sequel of sorts to the previous film as the same performers are in both films and the characters played by Kim Min-hee have similar names. As it turns out interpreting the film in this manner is misleading but I would still blame the director for dangling this plot thread that comes to nothing.
Even when you do understand what is going on, the likely reaction is being nonplussed. The story and the emotions involved are all so generic and ordinary. As my wife notes, it’s very much as if the director doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say. The thing is that the individual scenes in this film are quite good. Kim’s acting is excellent and the social interactions have a dynamic flow to them which pulls you in. One exception is the scenes in Germany which are awkward and flat without being interesting in the least. I thought watching Korean characters interacting in Germany would be a novelty but the film mostly just sidestepped the issue with both the characters and the director not knowing how to deal with the German friends they meet. I get that language is an issue but then why even choose to have scenes in Germany at all?
It’s a little more understandable why this film exists when you learn that Kim and Hong were having an affair with each other at around this time and this might be semi-autobiographical. Perhaps this is their way of dealing with the situation and so it’s an important film for them. However it’s hard to see why anyone else would care.