InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
channeling that truth into performance. The cousin says she
understands… but one has their doubts.
The second narrative stars Gi Jubong (Hotel by the River,
Introduction) as a renowned poet. A young film student is making
a film about him, and he laments to her that he can no longer
drink or smoke due to health concerns (much like Hong himself).
They’re visited by a young man who, like Kim’s cousin, wants to
go into acting. He wants the poet’s advice, though it’s not entirely
clear why (we may surmise that it has something to do with the
pretty documentarian, though she doesn’t seem to know who he
is). The young man asks the old one vague questions (what is
love, why make art, what is it all for, etc.) and gets truthful but
perhaps poorly comprehended answers. The scene is
reminiscent of the third film-within-a-film in Hong’s 2010
masterpiece, Oki’s Movie, in which two film students ask their
professor a variety of questions about life and art and take in his
pithy, reasonably profound responses. One of the poet’s answers
is essentially the same as one the professor in that film gave:
when asked why he chose to pursue poetry, the poet explains
that he doesn’t know, and more to the point, that he doesn’t know
why he does anything; in Oki’s Movie, the professor claims “In life.
. . of all the important things I do, there’s none I know the reason
for. I don’t think there is.” This, in turn, echoes Hong’s
recent comments at a New York retrospective of his work, as
reported in The New Yorker: “The most precious thing in life is
always something that is given to me. If I look back on my life,
the most wonderful things were always given to me, free or
unexpectedly. Never in life did I get something wonderful by
trying to get it or with a strong intention.” Instead, as Hong has
done in several films recently, the poet asserts a kind of
existentialism: what is important is living in the moment, in truly
seeing and experiencing what is in front of your face.
So if we combine ideas central to these two stories, we might
have something like Hong and Kim’s theory of art: radical
personal honesty and emotional truth, combined with an
openness to any possible experience of the world and of chance.
These theories are put to the test in the second half of the film.
The beloved cat Us disappears and his owner is distraught,
crying and screaming in anguish. After walking the streets
looking for him, she comes home and collapses in a heap on the
floor, as Kim calmly tries to get her to relax and focus on the
next step of the search. Song Sunmi’s performance, to this point
in tune with Hong’s usual register of relaxed naturalism, becomes
so demonstrative, the performance of her emotion so extreme
(though essentially just lying still), that it pushes the bounds of
believability. Is this the honesty Kim advised? Or is the
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