Hong Sang-soo, 2008
SCENE: Male, nowhere near his home, is slightly drunk. His ex-girlfriend, who he is drinking with, may or may not be slightly drunker than he is. They might be standing too close to each other. How long ago did they break up? It’s unclear, but of less importance than what they are saying. What are they saying? Not much, but it’s of less importance than what their complicated and intimate dialogue increasingly infers. What does their dialogue infer? That the universe is fucking infinite.
For Hong Sang-soo, this verbal inner/outer interrelationship is key; his attempts at cultivating the kernels of emotional minutiae encased within everything we say, here, again, forming his ongoing inquiry into our universe of perceptions and reactions. It’s a diary, a daydream, and a dialogue between the interiority and the ever-expanding exteriors that come with environmental unfamiliarity.
In this, his seventh fully auteured feature, he drizzles a Parisian rain-shower of forced absence and discontented vacancy over the episodic narrative of self-exiled Sung-nam – a painter temporarily couched in Paris’ community of Korean artists - and in the process Sang-soo finds in it a structural harmony that eclipses his previous works’ attempts at formatting; the inherently quotidian nature of this diagrammatic daily diary wringing myriad meaningful moments from a wealth of uneventful events and microscopic mannerisms.
Approaching something like a mastery of his ubiquitous usage of scripted/improvised scenario’s (often dictated by the available locations at his disposal) involving his typically temporally complex web of interpersonal relationships, Sang-soo’s work largely differs from Hou Hsiaou-hsien’s seemingly similar The Flight Of The Red Balloon; where that work attempts to engage with a decidedly precise cultural lineage (Lamorisse, Musée d’Orsay, Paris as iconic city/entity, etc…), Sang-soo’s Paris is an anti-context, an empty shell-like conduit for Sung-nam’s displacement that is as alienating for him as it is liberating, and as culturally relevant (“I figured, being a painter, that I should see Paris at least once”) as it is geographically untranslatable and meaningless (the previous quote a lie Sung-nam tells his Korean ‘uncle’). However, whilst his re-imagining of Paris itself is seemingly a comment on the fluidic interchangeability of concrete cities and the concrete certainty of the human heart, his use of the city’s spaces is subtler, and perhaps best exemplified during Sung-nam’s walking fight with semi-love-interest Yoo-jeung: as they cross the Pont Royal and bicker over the imbalance in affection they share and the existence of Sung-nam’s wife, Sang-soo’s camera, lagging, pans after them, stopping intermittently to take in the view; Sang-soo suggesting, for the briefest of moments, that whilst one will always verily live within, sometimes one cannot ignore one’s complementary outer; least not Paris; least not he.
