NYFF COVERAGE – “Koreans are too fond of sex. They have nothing better to do. There’s no real culture.” While the last of these statements is certainly up for debate, a quick glance at the films of Hong Sang-soo would seem to lend credence to the first two statements. This evaluation of the sex life of contemporary South Korea is voiced by Munho, one of the protagonists of Hong’s new film, Woman is the Future of Man. Munho is a typical Hong male character: baffled by the mysteries of female sexuality (and perhaps also his own), he unscrupulously seeks sex from his university students or from an old flame, mustering only a shrug of self-derision in response.
The film begins as Munho’s old friend, Hunjoon, returns from film school in America. As so often happens in Hong’s films, the two linger over an extended (and boozy) lunch and reminisce over old times. Each secretly reflects over a woman, Sunhwa, whom they were both involved with: Hunjoon before leaving for the United States, Munho after his friend’s departure. Drunk from rice wine and nostalgic with the season’s first snowfall, the two friends decide to seek out Sunhwa in a neighboring town, and proceed to reopen old wounds and old relations in ways that continue to muddy their attitudes toward each other and to sex in general.
Like the films of his great cinematic influence, Robert Bresson, Hong’s films play solely on the surface of their characters actions, but his style relies much less on montage and close-ups than the French director’s. Usually in long takes and wide shots, the camera documents the intricacies of the strained, occasionally mortifying interactions and mundane situations. His graphic, mostly unpleasant depictions of sex are also framed at an equivocal distance, insisting upon a frustratingly amoral stance in the face of his characters actions and motivations.
Woman is the Future of Man confronts its viewers with this total ambiguity, pitching its characters into one grey moral area after another and abjuring all opportunities to comment on their reactions. The film’s tone shifts from light satirical comedy (hinted by its jumpy, light-hearted score) to grim realism (expressed by its clinical blue palette) within a scene; its title could be construed as either mocking or hopeful, depending on one’s reading; and its final minutes provide only the most cursory of resolutions. The film does not overtly experiment with narrative as some of Hong’s previous films have, but its deceptively meandering structure instills the same sense of doubt and confusion in the spectator as the rigorously schematic ordering of events in The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors. Here again, Hong has created a film that is provocative, even disturbing in its resistance to categorization, demanding from its viewers a response without the reassurance of psychology or narration.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MK2 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:17 PM | Comments (1)
What seemed for me, at first, the straight flatness and shockingly unbroken “stillness” of the scenes, grew subtly, in my experience of this film, as a study in internalized longing by the two male protagonists. The music was delicately balanced to tweak one’s sense of the men’s painful nostalgia, while Sunhwa seems to contain her wisdom like a sacred prostitute, a true manifestation of an eternal archetype . She is the goddess, and these men worship at the altar of their desire for her even as she acknowledges and yields to their need for healing. The poignancy comes from our sense that there is no “ending” and no resolution.
Albert Krauss
26 June 2007
12:45 AM
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