Hong Sang Soo, Master of the Mundane
Reflecting on the filmmaker and taking a bet on the everyday
Yesterday afternoon I watched Right Now, Wrong Then, a 2015 film by Korean director Hong Sang Soo. I’ve been on a bit of a Hong Sang Soo kick of late. Fans call him the Korean Woody Allen. To detractors, “All his films are the same.” The themes Hong weaves into Right Now — themes of repetition, the mundane — come up in his earlier works too, most notably The Day He Arrives (2011).
In both films, the main character, a film director who must not be unlike Hong himself, drifts through a series of familiar events which are then replayed with minor details changed. Each retelling of the same story yields different results. Sometimes to great extent, where each retelling shows us how small, seemingly insignificant details can compound to have profound and significant effects later on that day.
The idea of each day as a melting pot, a laboratory testing variations of moods, people, and settings, has got me thinking a lot about its relevance to my life. If I were cast in a Hong Sang Soo film, what small levers would he pull or press that could compound and influence my day in not-so-small ways?
In The Day He Arrives, a director who lives in the countryside arrives in Seoul for the weekend to meet a friend. The film replays that scene three times, with minor details changing each time. The first time, he meets the friend for dinner, they part ways, and he ends up drinking with a few film students until he gets upset and heads back to his ex’s apartment for an unwelcome reunion. The second time, the director’s friend brings another friend along for their meal, which extends the dinner conversation into drinks at a bar and no visit to the ex. The third time, almost exact same circumstances as the second, but a change in the weather and slight change in conversation topics leads to a romantic foray with the bar owner.
Same beginning each time, different endings. It’s unclear whether Hong is replaying the same day again and again, changing small things here and there to see how each outcome changes. Or whether we’re in a new day that just feels like the day before because the circumstances are so similar.
We could say the same about life. How often do our days blend together, the same basic circumstances playing out with minor details shifting? Sometimes leading to curious blips of significance. Sometimes not.
A funny thing happened to me the other week that you might call one of those curious blips. I do the same walk home from work every day, a relatively uneventful walk down 4th Street in San Francisco. So I was walking home, talking to my brother on the phone, when I ran into one of my ex’s I haven’t seen in several years. We’re not Facebook friends, I didn’t realize she was in town, and she lives halfway around the world. Small world.
What’s more interesting to me is the seemingly insignificant circumstances leading up to that small world moment — me deciding to stay a few minutes after work to finish something up, her deciding to break from her conference and drop by the Whole Foods that’s on my walk home.
We ended up catching up the following evening. It was nice. Nothing revolutionary or life-changing, nothing revelatory. Just a series of circumstances that led to a meaningful blip on the radar.
I think there’s a tendency to look back on small world moments and specific junctures in life and draw out their relevance on a more significant time frame than the span of a day. Choosing one job over another. Moving to a new city. You can clearly pinpoint the before and after and its effect on your life.
Hong Sang Soo prefers the small world moments and specific junctures that are not necessarily life changing but profound in the context of that day. No more and no less. In his films, he seems to ask, what if you went back to an insignificant moment and changed an insignificant detail?
Most of the time nothing would change. But maybe it would — and in that liminality is where his films shine.
Say you’re at a party. You meet a girl at that party. You could have passed her over, you’re there with another friend and there are a lot of people you will meet, and not meet, that evening. You hit it off, exchange numbers. When you leave the party that night, you may never text her. You may never see her again. If you embrace the chance, though, maybe you will. You’ll ask her on a date, one date becomes two. A blip on life’s radar.
Maybe one night you’re on the rooftop with that girl and it’s just you and the girl and it’s romantic and you’re drinking wine. Another night, same circumstances — only this time other characters end up entering the scene. A banker with a British accent, a Japanese woman who speaks in truisms (“Health is wealth”), and a washed up executive assistant to the financial advisor we all know as “Chuck.” All in the scene are drunk. Wisdom is shared. Cue laughter.
The same setting — a boy and girl on a rooftop — with minor details changed to great effect. And even at the initial meeting between this boy and girl, at the party, there are more coincidences leading to that exchange of numbers, that initial blip. My life is a Hong Sang Soo film.
I had a friend from New York visit me in San Francisco last weekend, and we were discussing these themes of repetition and the mundane, chance and spontaneity. Coors Light got the words flowing and as we were talking I realized these kind of conversations can easily turn into analyses of a million different minor events and their unexpected outcomes. We tried to bring things back into focus. Takeaways?
I think we concluded that we need to be more open to the unexpected. If something small comes up, don’t be afraid to follow it and divert from the usual path.
My friend had just read The Power of Now, which shaped a lot of his thinking on living in the present moment. We left his Airbnb high on the power of spontaneity, headed to a mutual college friend’s house party. On the walk over we joked about what chance encounter at the party would influence our evening in unexpected ways. If only.
That night ended up being relatively uneventful, but as I’m writing this, thinking about being more open to the spontaneous, I’m remembering one of the most riotous nights from my year abroad, in Taipei of all places.
I went to Taipei for the weekend with two other friends. On our first night an impromptu message from a Tinder match took us to a speakeasy with a one-armed bartender named Payman. Later, my friend’s dash into a closed-up sushi spot had us meeting with “Boss” and his mafia cohorts, leading to an entirely unexpected chapter of the night with a few twists and turns that thankfully ended well.
That night could have ended at the speakeasy. Yet a small moment — my hungry friend dipping into a sushi restaurant — led to a compounding of other small details that totally changed the course of the night.
Obviously being open to the unexpected may not always lead to unexpected results. More often that not, every day will become just that, everyday.
In Right Now, Wrong Then, the main character, a director, arrives in Suwon from Seoul, and the film takes us through his day exploring the city, centered around a chance encounter with a painter named Hee-jung. Strikingly similar circumstances to The Day He Arrives. And maybe that’s the point.
The film plays and replays, once, the story of the director and the painter. You could call it a love story, though nothing really transpires beyond their one day together. Small details change between the first and second replaying of events, in typical Hong Sang Soo fashion.
The end result is not categorically different. The romantic tension builds and builds only to never truly consummate itself. The director and painter part ways. The joy of the film is in noticing the subtle variations between part one and two. Variations of degree, not kind. One joke brings them closer, another further apart.
A reviewer of the film for Variety, Guy Lodge, sums it up nicely: “It may be said that neither scenario adds up to an awful lot, both playing out with an everyday sense of anticlimax: Life continues, feelings fade…”
Every day we live can feel everyday. Repetitive. Mundane. Small things will inevitably come and go. Some will lead to something not-so-small, those blips on the radar. Others, to that “everyday sense of anticlimax,” no clear resolution. It’s by embracing every day, and taking a bet on the former despite the latter, where our hearts flutter and we begin to see the shades of liminality in Hong Sang Soo’s films in our own lives.
