A young actress tries to get over a break-up in this latest musing on love, etc. from Hong Sang-Soo…
Prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo gives us another slice of meditation on the minefield which is human interaction in On the Beach Alone at Night, one of three films he’s made this year, along with Claire’s Camera and The Day After.
For those familiar with Hong’s work, this is a variation on a range of common themes. There are dialogue-heavy ponderings on love and relationships, miscommunications and misinterpretations, litres of booze and drunken faux pas, and all played out against a backdrop of the ordinary – dinner with friends, chance meetings on street corners, drinks in a local bar or coffee shop.
The action is more linear than some of Hong’s previous work, like Hill of Freedom, but shares the same wry scrutiny of interpersonal relationships and ambiguous ending. Many of the cast are regulars in Hong films, including the luminous Kim Min-hee (The Handmaiden, Right Now, Wrong Then) who gives a fantastic performance as a young actress, Young-hee, which is by turns brash and defensive, brittle and vulnerable, funny and naive.
The first of two acts is set in Hamburg, where Young-hee has come to lick her wounds after an affair with a married film director Sang-won (Moon Seong-keun, Haemoo aka Sea Fog, A Girl at My Door), who may or may not be coming to join her. As she wanders around the gray city, admiring its frankly drab sites, she and her Korean friend dissect the relationship and try to determine what it really is they both really want out of love and life. In this, the idea of feelings lost in translation is literal – the two Korean women’s interactions with the locals hampered, and in places distorted, by the lack of a shared language, with often comical results. As with all Hong films’ the action is shot very simply with long static takes and natural light and sound, but this naturalistic approach is interrupted by the frankly surreal appearance of a stranger who literally sweeps Young-hee off her feet. Is this a dream? Is it real?
In the second act Young-hee is back in Korea and still coming to terms with the end of the relationship. But here the affair is still big news and it’s hard for Young-hee to shake off the gossip. Over copious cigarettes and glasses of makgeolli she rails against it with her friends, who share their views on the pitfalls and pratfalls of romantic entanglement. Exhausted and alone the next day she sleeps on the beach, only to be woken by one of her ex-lover director’s staff. They’re in the area filming, would she like to join them to keep warm on the beach? Later at dinner with the crew she angrily confronts her former lover. She wakes. As at the end of Act 1 we are left with the same questions – was this a dream or was it real?
This very open-ended narrative is typical of Hong’s work and one of its pleasures: it leaves the viewer to decide what’s real, what’s imagined and what happens next. It’s light on action and plot, but its subject – human connection – is profound.