Un jour avec, un jour sans

This film won the Golden Leopard (Best Film award) at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival. By mistake, a film director arrives in a town a day early to attend a screening of one of his films. With time to kill, he strikes up a conversation with an aspiring painter who he meets in a temple and they spend the rest of the day together. Although he finds her attractive, she is considerably younger than him and neither of them are particularly outgoing. A bit like Sliding Doors or Kieslowski's Blind Chance, the film splits into two different versions of what happens over the next 24 hours but, unlike those two films, the outcome depends not so much on chance but on how the main character chooses to behave. Any further info would inevitably contain spoilers so let's just say that it reminded me of some of Erich Roemer's films and is a sort of moral tale. Whether or not you will like Right Now, Wrong Then will probably depend on what you think of the dialogue, which pretty much dominates (there is not much action and little in the way of visuals or soundtrack). In my view, it is almost a really good film but the script needed sharpening up, as my attention started wandering off more than once. Perhaps a bit more humour and a slightly faster pace would have helped, However, it is a thought-provoking film and I found it ultimately satisfying when it ended, which is why I give it 7/10.

Maybe it's because I haven't seen any of Sang-soo's other films but Right Now, Wrong Then left me cold and unimpressed. I can see the appeal this film has but I personally found the film a tad annoying. It feels more like a South Korean remake of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby that admittedly was more interesting than The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. I was also surprised to see Lady Hideko here. Kim Min- Hee is one of few things that are great about the film, even if she wasn't as impressive as she was in The Handmaiden. If you like the director you might like Right Now, Wrong Then but I was overall just left cold with the film.

For the last few months, I'd read about Hong Sang-soo and his movies, and they sounded very appealing. There was a lot of hearsay about his body of work that drew me to him: His movies have a slice-of-life feel to them, his shooting style is minimalist, his annual output is two or three movies a year, and his movies are on some level closely tied to his life experiences. I have a huge affinity for these qualities at the present, so I knew sooner or later I had to watch his movies.

Watching this has instantly made me a fan. There is much to love about it: Chance encounters, cigarette smoking, drunken hangouts; cringey but moving outpourings of feelings; mutual and one-sided instances of platonic and romantic connectivity; naturalistic acting, long takes, zooms; and to top it all off, a story that gets told twice with glaring and subtle differences in the second telling. Really great stuff. It's everything I want in a movie.

But what I really appreciate is the vulnerability and openness this movie presents. It presents being honest as important and it shows how in a gentle way.

The bar scene in the second half was just wonderful.

I've been a fan of Sang-soo for some years yet his frustrating insistence to continually repeat himself is now annoying me.

Sure you can guarantee failed romance and time wasted drunk in korean bars in Sang-soo films and I'm fine with that in theory.

The problem I have is that everything else once you've seen a few just seems so repetitive as well...

Ie the kinds of creative characters he chooses to portray, the form of the films, the dynamics between characters, the voice over narration, I could go on and on.

In totality, they are just far far too repetitive for me. I was absolutely fine with all this until this film. For me this film was like the product of a once great now semi-senile 90 year old director just repeating himself after a golden age of great films decades before.

He really is starting to make the decrepit Woody Allen look original!

I'll probably watch the next Sang-soo film that comes out as well but with a lot more caution not expecting much.

Contrary to the many Korean films I have seen lately, in which the originality, the creativity, the excellence of the stories and the great representations generally prevail, in this film all these aspects fell short of my expectations. I expected a lot more, not least because the little synopsis I read about the film was quite promising. In recent times, this was the first Korean film that deceived me. I did not feel special empathy for any character and found the performances at a level below what is normal for Korean actors and actresses.