This article was first published on WeChat public account: Reasoning Movie
Jean Renoir, the French master of "poetic realism" once said, "A director only makes one film in his life."
From the perspective of world film history, many directors have spent their entire lives speaking for this sentence. For example, Yasujiro Ozu of the Japanese team, Wang Jiawei of the Chinese team, Quentin Tarantino of the American team, and Fellini of the Italian team.
And if the South Korean team only sends one representative to the competition, there is no doubt that it will be Hong Sangxiu.
As long as you have watched more than two Hong Sang-soo films, it is not difficult to find many similarities between his films.
First, the theme is to describe the love between literary men and young women.
The second is to carry out large dialogues of characters in fixed scenes, and there are iconic push-pull shots.
Third, the experimental narrative structure.
In addition, it is even more difficult to count the scenes, props, and people that appear repeatedly in his films.
For example, winter nights, taverns, temples, soju, coffee, directors, writers, lonely people...
You might ask, won't the audience get tired of always shooting the same thing?
Maybe.
But Hong's superficial repetition always seems to contain some fresh ingenuity, which is the aura that burst out of his mind at different stages of life.
Since 2010, Hong's works have become more mature and mature , and the film festival won the award.
"Right Now, Wrong Then" is the "best of the best" in Hong Sangxiu's 2010s series of works .
The film won the top prize at the Locarno International Film Festival that year (2015).
"Right Then Wrong" played a new trick in the structure of the film.
Similar to "The Last Night on Earth" directed by Bi Gan , the film is cut from the middle of the progress bar, and the film is divided into two parts of almost equal duration.
But Director Hong is obviously bigger than Bi Gan. The two parts of him are almost the same story, with only different developments in the details of the plot.
Even the title of the movie appeared twice, which is really an interesting "shadow cheat".
The first half of the film tells the story of a director named Ham Chun-soo (played by Jung Jae-young) who went to Suwon to participate in the film festival, and met Yin Xi-jung (played by Kim Min-hee), a down-and-out female painter in his spare time.
The two fell in love while chatting, and went to cafes, studios, taverns, and friend gatherings together, but when the female artist learned that the male protagonist already had a family, she became disheartened and drove the male protagonist away.
To the surprise of all fans, the second half of the movie is basically the same story, only the details of the story, the characters and the final ending are different, and obviously, this time the story is more moving.
No spoilers here. Please savor it when you watch the movie.
There are two intertextual titles before and after, corresponding to the two parallel time and space of "wrong" and "right" .
In Hong Sangxiu's usual awkward aesthetic atmosphere, the characters' small choices in a split second lead their emotions to different paths. The emotions of the reader are brought into the field of reflection.
In the control experiment of two stories, the changes of details accumulate, and finally trigger a qualitative effect:
A big reversal of the characters.
In the first story, the heroine played by Jin Minxi was very insecure, and the hero praised her paintings accordingly. These praises were ruthlessly dismantled in the later part of the gathering of friends. It turned out that this was just a The hero's usual tactic of commenting on a movie, not a candid statement of sincere praise.
In the second story, the male protagonist's image is obviously more "cute" . One of the most significant shifts was his choice to open up and talk more candidly with the heroine. In the tavern, the male protagonist expressed his love very sincerely, but also revealed the fact that he was married quite frankly.
The frankness of the male protagonist in the second time and space completely changes the ending of the previous time and space, making the whole relationship delicate.
By the end of the entire film, the mood of the two is completely different from the ending of the first version.
Of course, Hong Sang-soo's view of love is not as simple as "If I can do it all over again, I choose to confess." When I was looking at the interview materials of the director, I saw the soul diagram of the relationship between two parallel time and space drawn by the director himself, so please feel it.
I hope you can communicate with me after watching this movie and share your understanding.
If this is your first time watching Hong Sang Soo,
congratulations,
This is definitely a movie-watching memory worth keeping.
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