North American audiences are finally getting a taste of the work of twice Cannes Golden Palm-nominated Korean director Hong Sang-soo, whose latest film, Woman on the Beach, screens at Film Forum until January 22. Though specific to his country’s cultural situation, the film offers flavors of twenty- to thirty-something angst, and emotional and romantic insecurity, that we clearly have an appetite for (see this year’s Knocked Up, Two Days in Paris, Margot at the Wedding, The Savages, or, looking further back, Reality Bites and most Woody Allen).
Woman on the Beach follows frustrated filmmaker Kim Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) to an off-season seaside resort with friend Won Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo) and his sort-of girlfriend Kim Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-joung). The ensuing love triangle is unbearably awkward, and – after a night of love-making that is also fairly awkward – leaves Joong-rae obsessing over another woman, Choi Sun-hee (Song Sun-mi). Throughout, meal scenes recur as the least awkward moments in these characters’ days: all agree on the deliciousness of Korean cuisine, providing their clearest connection to a quickly-disappearing cultural tradition. That said, the director-in-the-movie (like the director of the film) has a strong hunger for other nations’ products – sushi for the former, European art cinema for the latter. By the end of Woman on the Beach we’re left with complex aftertastes of desperately realistic characters, and a movie that initially looks casual but is actually a delicate fusion of Korean and international ingredients.
With such delicious odes to modern relationships and the anxieties of early adulthood as Woman on the Beach, Hong Sang-soo is at the head table of the Korean film feast. Like other directors of this Korean new wave enjoying the banquet – Chan-wook Park (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance), Joon-ho Bong (The Host) and Ki-duk Kim (3-Iron) – Hong has an insatiable taste for cinematic fusion, combining styles and genres from disparate film traditions and simmering them in a distinctively Korean sauce. That unmistakable flavor, which all four directors share (all were born in the 1960s), is particular to a generation of Koreans growing up in a rapidly-Westernizing society.
In using this sometimes sweet, sometimes sour sauce, Hong makes subtler dishes than those coming from his compatriots’ kitchens. Woman on the Beach doesn’t trade in the wildly entertaining genre-blenders Joon-ho cooks up, nor does it resemble the strongly-stylized romance (Ki-Duk) and violence (Chan-wook) served by other chefs of Korean cinema. Hong’s dishes, like Woman on the Beach, incorporate ingredients from Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut and Robert Altman, the lot served on a bed of contemporary Korean characters and concerns. Don’t miss this opportunity for a taste of this budding Korean auteur’s new fusion cuisine.
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