Since I’ve been talking about minimalism in films recently, the works of director Hong Sang-soo so I haven’t previously described them as such. This one is even more minimalist with four characters and pretty much nothing in the way of background extras. This one embodies some of the director’s favorite themes about patterns and events recurring with small changes and the performances are strong as always. But the scenario here is so forced and simplistic that it borders on the farcical and so empty of establishing details that it’s not believable at all. I would consider this a weak film even if it does have artistic aspirations.
Kim Bong-wan is the owner of a small publishing company and is married. His wife comes to suspect him of having an affair and rather than outright deny her accusation, he just dismisses her concerns. He is indeed having an affair but the girl, his employee, has already left after accusing of being a coward for being unable to break it off with his wife. One day he welcomes a new employee Song Ah-reum and immediately starts getting close to her by asking personal questions. Then while Bong-wan is out of the office, his wife arrives and accuses Ah-reum of being the mistress. Ah-reum is of course bewildered, this being her first day at the office, but this doesn’t prevent the wife from hitting her. Bong-wan arrives and tries to calm things down, admitting that he did have an affair but the girl has left and Ah-reum is innocent. However he is rather bad at it and acts as if he were beleaguered and not as if everything was his fault in the first place.
Hong Sang-soo released several films in 2017 with this being only one of them and unfortunately it seems like this is one the weaker ones. After sorting through the confusion of the different women and when the different scenes take place, the story is simple and straightforward. Sang-soo is plainly a womanizer who only wants to bed women and only says what the women want to hear in order to get them to do what he wants. The only confusion is why the women find him so attractive and believe him despite his inability to give straightforward answers and commitments. But then I realized that this seems like director’s attempt to make a South Korean version of a Woody Allen romantic comedy including a protagonist who is not conventionally attractive and somewhat intellectual. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything amusing or affecting in this and it’s just frustrating how Sang-soo can talk and talk and yet not really say anything really significant. Ah-reum does seem to have some depth to her as she asserts firm personal beliefs yet she isn’t altogether immune to Sang-soo’s charms either. In the end, I’m not really sure what the point of all that is.
This film also irritates me in that in doing away almost entirely with background extras, what ought to be a busy city feels oddly empty and isolated, as if these few characters are the only people who inhabit it. Similarly they show a publishing house in which no one actually does any work. There’s just no effort to root the drama in any kind of a real setting. As my wife notes, it’s so strange that Ah-reum comes to work and on her first day Bong-wan asks her all kinds of personal questions and she actually answers as if they’ve known each other for a very long time. Instead of talking about work or what kind of skills Ah-reum has, the questions are about her family and her philosophy of life. I suppose Bong-wan really is a horny bastard who hires pretty young women not actually to do work for him but it’s weird why Ah-reum plays along. In a Western film, there would be some kind of comeuppance for Bong-wan but this one just kind of peters out making it clear that he is absolutely insincere about professing love and that this is a perfectly normal state of affairs.
Anyway there is some craft in putting this together and the performers are good but I don’t see the point in this film and I don’t like it at all.