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PostPosted: Mon Sep 20, 2010 1:07 pm 
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JUNG YUMI AND LEE SUN-KYUN IN OKI'S MOVIE

Shuffled film school triangle

Hong Sang-soo means philandering drinkers, egocentric filmmakers, pretty women, winter weather, and endless self-reflectiveness. This can lead him to good character studies, ironic laughs, keenly observed almost-real-time flirtations -- and to a light intellectualism and energetic use of dialogue that owe a clear debt to the French New Wave. This time, due to dividing the film into four short segments with the same triangle in rearranged situations, the repetitiousness and self-absorption are carried to an almost geometric extreme, and the situations, despite a Rashōmon-esque multiple examination, come through as thoughtful in a film-school sort of way, but otherwise only superficially delved into. Hong Sang-soo fans, who include myself, will still not want to miss this because it explores further themes already richly dabbled in by the filmmaker. Others may fail to be entranced.

Basically we get an older director and teacher and a younger one, and a pretty young woman film student; sometimes the younger director is just a student. In the first episode, A Day for Incantation, the tall, deep-voiced younger filmmaker Jingu (boyish Korean star Lee Sun-kyun, 35 now and so able to straddle the fence) is experienced and married; in later episodes he will revert to mere student status. Here, he has supposedly quit smoking and drinking but is slipping back, to his wife's disapproval. He discusses the decline of filmmaking in a bad economy with older film professor Song (Moon Sung-keun). He gets drunk and annoys Song with questions about a rumor that he's bought his tenure. Then he goes, drunk, to a Q&A following showing of a short film he's just made and he is called to task by a young woman for jilting her best friend -- in an affair even though he's married.

In the second episode, King of Kisses, Jingu is purely a student, pursuing Oki (Jung Yumi), another student, who rejects him for drinking and notes his classmates call him "psycho." But he proves himself a good kisser, and after staying up all night in the cold outside Oki's flat, she takes him in and has sex with him and agrees she's his girlfriend. She is probably having sex with Song, the professor and older man, at this time.

The very short episode After the Snowstorm is from the viewpoint of Song, here a disillusioned film teacher whose classroom after the snowstorm is completely empty. Finally just two students, Jingu and Oki, show up, and he engages in a question and answer session with them about life and love, firing off rapid, arguably superficial answers.

The fourth and titular episode Oki's Movie purports to be a movie made by and narrated by Oki, the girl film student, in which she depicts her two lovers, Song and Jingu, whom she accompanies on the same walk up Acha mountain in the wintertime a year apart, going back and forth between the two lovers and showing what the two lovers and she said and did at various points, the parking lot, the entrance, the pavilion, and how many times they went to the restroom on the way up. The gist is that she was very involved with both men at the same time, and felt herself to be equally in love with them both, but later dropped the older one.

There is a certain almost mathematical interest in the recombinations here, but the cutting up of the film into the four segments keeps any scene from being played through to the point of developing depth, a danger that has arisen in earlier Hong films, which are often divided into two or three parts set in different locations. I confess to a weakness for Hong Sang-soo through multiple Lincoln Center viewings, and can forgive him his greatest self-indulgence. But though aspects of the first and last parts of this film are memorable, I'm afraid this has the weakness of his earlier films in even greater measure: that they will be most enjoyable to watch for an hour or so, but afterward all that may remain are vague memories of blowhard movie directors getting drunk or laid -- usually both -- or standing talking on the beach.

Oki's Movie (Ok-hui-ui yeonghwa), a film of 80 minutes from South Korea, was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2010. It premiered at Venice several weeks earlier and also was shown at Toronto.

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