At the Korean Film Festival this week, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach emerged as the filmmaker’s most accessible and perhaps revelatory work yet – and the festival’s best among eight others. TIM WONG caught Hong’s new wave.


UNDULATING with now-familiar Hong Sang-soo landscapes – a sodden male protagonist, women triangulating his every move, slightly drunken conversations over food and drink – Woman on the Beach is a quiet revelation. For Korea’s most interesting director, this is evolved stuff, a delicate balancing act between ostensibly quaint comedy-romance, and the self-reflexive dexterity of Hong’s previous masterstroke Tale of Cinema. That ‘dexterity’ is a far more muted and covert undertaking here, but is no less pronounced once the character of Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) – a filmmaker, of course – seizes the moment to make a move on Moon-sook (Ko Hyeon-gang), his attractive travel companion who along with crew member-in-tow Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo), have embarked on a weekend getaway to the Shunduri beach resort in the hope its tranquil setting will allow Joong-rae’s script writing juices to flow. Instead of being productive company, Moon-sook becomes a convenient distraction for Joong-rae, and Hong pokes away at his enamoured exterior with a succession of curious and inquisitive camera zooms. That, along with the three-pronged interplay between man, woman and man announces that this is indeed a Hong Sang-soo film, as does the narrative’s alternating mid-point, which like Tale of Cinema, reminds us that this is as always, a game of two halves.

Returning to the resort two days later alone, and hoping to rendezvous with Moon-sook, it takes several unreturned voice messages before Joong-rae has impetuously moved onto another woman, Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi). The two begin another fleeting romance – covering the same tracks by way of sushi, walks on the beach, and reckless bedroom frolics – only for Moon-sook to arrive in a late-night hysterical rage, completing the third corner of yet another love triangle, only this time inverted with girls outnumbering Joong-rae 2-to-1. Cue layers of subtext, further insights into human nature, imitation of life/art etc. – the playground of Hong Sang-soo. Reflecting the duality of Tale of Cinema’s one-two punch is Joong-rae’s proposed screenplay, a rather apt story of a man who’s convinced a series of coincidences hold a much deeper meaning. Moon-sook and Sun-hee, in their likeness, also hold the key to unlocking this director’s fortress ego – and revealingly, the emotionally trainwrecked content for his film. But from this proverbial hall of mirrors – which Joong-rae hilariously tries to explain via a philosophical diagram scribbled on his notepad – two strong, independent women emerge, unusually and assuredly, as if wrestling free from the dunes of Shunduri’s seemingly innocuous beach. Encapsulated in the film’s final scene is a sign Hong finally concurs with critics that his female characters needn’t be drowned in a tide of male narcissism. Like Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, the Rohmer comparisons have come thick and fast; though hasn’t Hong by now well and truly established his own turf? With Woman on the Beach, he draws a line in the sand. Let’s hope this funnier, more appealing, though no less inquisitive Hong Sang-soo continues to be his own man – and that women feature as prominently in his future.

See also:
» Imperfect Storm: Typhoon
» Scenes by the Sea: Woman on the Beach
» Korean Film Festival ‘06: The Host, Duelist
» Monster Mash: The Host