With each new movie from Hong Sang-Soo comes the possibility, however slight, that the minutely-focused Korean craftsman is going to finally drop the ball, finally lose the fine balance of replication and experimentation that’s by now become a trademark of his canon. Averaging roughly one movie per year for the last decade or so, Hong remains less prolific than consistent, churning out modular, successively modulated riffs of a recurring set of themes and plot devices, with minute modifications made to the dramatic and metaphoric import of these narratives. His films routinely flirt with the doldrums of burnt-out repetition, incorporating it as an essential structural tenet while remaining formally adventurous and singularly distinct. This is done via a repeating narrative motif, usually involving some low-functioning alcoholic director, who ends up entangled in one or more foolhardy, melancholy romantic ventures. It’s a dynamic that has by now taken on Groundhog Day-style pathos, with the director involved in an apparent state of limbo as profound as that of his characters, a perception only confirmed by recent rumors of infidelity with Right Now, Wrong Then’s lead actress.
The film itself concerns a filmmaker, Ham Chu-su (Jung Jae-young), who’s visiting the small town of Suwon for a screening of one of his movies. After becoming fixated on a woman named Hee-jeong (Kim Min-hee) he spots at a local Buddhist shrine, he strikes up a conversation, tags along on a trip to her painting studio, a restaurant and a friend’s dinner party, and then bungles the entire flirtation, stumbling to his next-day lecture in a hungover fog. This story gets repeated in two similar iterations, the second retracing the general beats, emotions, and metaphors of the first, while tracing a slightly different overall arc. Beyond turning the two narratives into a sort of Spot the Difference puzzle, this method, which Hong has utilized in the past to somewhat different effect, helps dig into now-familiar concerns about storytelling, ego and obsession, while only deepening the broader aura of exhaustion that hangs over his work.
There are a few clear demarcation points between the two stories. The first section involves a corollary third character, a student of Ham’s who’s desperate to work as his assistant on his next project, and who doesn’t appear at all in the next one. Part two also drops the first-person narration which popped up sporadically in the first. This provokes a suspicion that the second half is intended as a bit of a course correction for the myopic ills of the first, although neither really digs too far into the perspective of Hee-jeong, a former model who now lives with her mother, spending her days engaged in artistic practice and her nights in lonely contemplation. As with much of Hong’s recent output, however, the focus remains on a female character’s response to male boorishness, rather than any attempts by the male to correct or atone for such behavior. In such a story structure, the character’s movement from an inactive object of male gaze to a creator herself echoes a larger progression in the focus of Hong’s work, while also signaling smaller shifts at work in this film itself.
In both sections Chun-su remains an unstable, self-pitying lout, and in neither case does he or his female counterpart show any real evolution toward enlightenment, but smaller signs of progress can still be found. A significant moment comes at the end of the second section, as Hee-jeong sits in the darkened theater, watching Chun-su’s latest film. The director himself crouches behind her, whispering in her ear. It’s perhaps the film’s most incisive, memorable composition, and beyond confirming a weird feedback loop between director, characters and the work in which both are immersed; again bears out the primacy of an initially secondary character, one learning to read signals, to fend off clumsy advances from emotionally unavailable, sexually aggressive men and ultimately to engage more freely in her own artistic practice. Of equal significance seems to be the fact that Right Now, Wrong Then bookends both sequences with a view of a Buddhist temple, its chimes ringing out in the cold air. The concept of Buddhist philosophy as an undercurrent beneath the director’s fixation on recurrence has long been a feature of Hong’s oeuvre, and with each new seemingly similar film this idea becomes clearer, another step in the slow, arduous journey toward perfection.
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