i love hong films so much. ;_; with each film, i become more certain of just what his project is. hong is passing a baton of traditional values down to the digital media contemporary. he is keeping the flame of something traditional alive. he is teaching us the proper way to live. his visual style, his narrative style, is (paradoxically) entirely determined by the internet, by the new millennium, by new media, by the new generations.

look, for example, at her painting in this film. the colour swatch she’s using in the first section is a bright, neon yellowish green—a very trendy colour in 2023 (in fact, it’s been trendy, and in 2023 it will already have been superseded by something i don’t know about). in the second half, she’s using a washed out, pale, de-saturated poppy red—again, another very trendy colour! look at the painting itself: a bunch of twisty tubes, organic, amorphous shapes; abstract, but neither geometric nor random, as in 20th century abstract art. she’s working in a very contemporary, postmodern, post-internet art genre (swear to god).

the film opens with the assistant girl idolizing Mr. Director. i am quite sure i’ve seen this dynamic repeated in other hong films, and it’s always the most difficult parts of his films for me to sit through. so often, there is an older male in a position of power and prestige being adored by young beautiful women. the extremely thin fictionality of his narratives makes it feel so in-your-face: this is where i would say it’s apt to compare him to woody allen. it’s difficult to see this as anything other than self-serving, an old man glorifying himself, right? but there is a detournement that 20th century filmmakers were leagues away from being able to conceive of.

hong’s films hand down a set of traditional values to the younger generations, of which the patriarchy is a big part. however, the artist is sensitive and feminine, just like his characters, so his films on the whole give us a critique of toxic masculinity and instead present a kind of utopian vision of a healthy gender dynamic that is structured by the patriarchy, but not determined by it. Mr. Director is a complex character, pulled between the role of oppressive and benevolent father. he exhibits some scummy behaviours, as when he very transparently uses his clout to make the girl pay attention to him (in both sections of the film). but he’s also “sensitive,” cries about how in love he is, and is excessively honest.

there’s a line where the love interest says she likes being appreciated “as a woman.” hong’s gender dynamics are traditional in a way that i personally can get behind. he appreciates masculinity and femininity, even as he does want to expand what those categories mean. he is passing down the baton of traditional values, but he also wants to filter them through a contemporary sensibility. the perfect dramatic model for this is a guy in his mid-30s falling in love with a girl in her mid-20s (hard to estimate korean ages). an age gap, but not one to get up in arms about (imo). Mr. Director in this film still looks youthful (boyish, dopey hair), but he’s undoubtedly got gravitas and power…and yet he is helpless, utterly helpless before the power of a beautiful girl he has a meet-cute with.

in the last film of his i watched, i was struck by what seemed to me his signature formal technique—the zoom—and how it seems to borrow from vernacular filmmaking. those aesthetics are very much still on display here, but as ever i am struck by the careful composition that belies this film’s seemingly careless, tossed-off nature. i kept comparing him to knausgard, whose formal technique is extremely highly refined to achieve a degree of transparency that makes the realism look effortless. when Mr. Director goes for a smoke outside the sushi restaurant, he bends down to pick something up. in the first section, this doesn’t pay off—but in the second section, it’s a ring! wow! and they get married! i read an interview where hong said he writes everything the day of, but you have to plan some things out…

the final sequence reveals his visual aesthetic in a way that i just love so much, and which is key to my thesis that hong is a filmmaker who, paradoxically, is responding to the internet / digital culture. the lighting and colour palette throughout this film, and his oeuvre in general, looks great and, in that sense, is indistinguishable from anything else. but in this final sequence, shot on a long lens outdoors at night, it’s clear that the lighting is straining the dynamic range of his camera, and the image can (to my eyes) be clearly discerned as DIGITAL VIDEO! it’s always at night, under non-ideal lighting, that digital grain peeps through. suddenly, it becomes clear that this uniquely digital medium, so heavily associated with post-internet and contemporary art, has been present the whole time. it underlies the film. less ostentatious than the zoom, but still a sign of the vernacular, and therefore key to hong’s humanist filmmaking. <3