I noticed yesterday that this was available as part of
Amazon’s Prime Instant Streaming service (along with
Hahaha, the other Hong
Sangsoo film I saw at the
Vancouver Film Festival in 2010). I watched it the other night and was happy to see that it remains my favorite of Hong’s movies, all of
which are marked by an unusual structure, in which elements, situations and/or
characters from the first part recur later in the film, in ways that deepen,
comment upon or subvert what has gone before.
Oki’s Movie is the most
structurally complex of the Hong movies I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the film that followed this, 2011's
The Day He Arrives), with a pretzel logic that twists
the film back on its maker, questioning the motivation for making Hong
Sangsoo films, or any films at all, in the first place.
At its most basic level, Oki’s Movie is a love triangle told
four ways, made up of four short films, each of which has its own credit
sequence of videotaped white characters on a blue background (the title song is
the same for each film: Edward Elgar’s "Pomp and Circumstance", a tune whose
relation to Graduation Day is perhaps a nod to the movies’ film school settings). The
most mysterious segment is the first one which
doesn't fit the later developed patterns or (possibly) characters at all. Its title (A Day for Incantation) suggests that it's the film that calls the other movies into being. Each
of the of the latter three films
focus on a love triangle between three characters: the girl Oki (Jung Yoo-mi),
the boy Jingu (Lee Seon-gyun) and their Professor Song (Moon Sung-keun), each
of whom are filmmakers. Each of the last three films correlates to one of their
points of view. But the characters are mixed up in the first film: Jingu is a married
film professor and filmmaker where later he will be a student, Song appears
only as a fellow professor Jingu admires but begins to have doubts about when
he hears he accepted a bribe to award another teacher tenure, and Oki doesn't
appear at all. Only at the end of the film, when an inebriated Jingu is doing an
audience Q & A prior to presenting his latest film, does the question of a
student's relationship with her teacher come up. A girl in the audience claims to have had a
friend Jingu dated when he was her professor, and that that relationship ruined the girl's life by sabotaging her relationship with her boyfriend.
My theory is that each of the subsequent films are movies
Jingu made inspired by the situation the questioner presented: a student having
an affair with her professor while she was also dating another student. In each
film, he casts himself as the boyfriend/hero and Song as the morally dubious
professor. In the second film (King of Kisses) Jingu plays the typical Hongian hero: romantic,
obsessive and often drunk. This film is the most similar to the first one in both
story and style (even the locations are the same: Jingu's home in the first film plays Oki's home in the second). One example of the rhymes between them: in each Jingu hangs
out on a park bench and falls asleep: in the second, he meets Oki and asks her
out; in the first, he has a flashback to when he met his wife, who he suspects
might now be cheating on him. (Maybe this is a flashback: wikipedia asserts that it is but the woman he meets is played by a different actress than his wife. Regardless, the story of the first Jingu's wife remains a
tantalizingly unexplored tangent, suggesting that the rest of the film could
have gone off in a myriad of other directions, not just the Song/Oki story.
Such loose ends that tease endless narrative possibilities are one of the
things that make Hong’s films seem so realistic, like they create entire
universes.) While the third and fourth films keep strictly to a single point of
view, King of Kisses is narrated more or less objectively: we also get scenes
from Oki and Song's perspectives, thus we know that they are having an affair
of which Jingu is ignorant. We also know that Oki is a little freaked out by
Jingu’s obsessive pursuit of her, but that she does genuinely like him. The
film ends happily, with Oki and Jingu together in the beginning stage of their
relationship, wishing each other a Merry Christmas and remarking on what a nice warm day it is.
The third and shortest film (After the Snowstorm) is about
Professor Song. After a blizzard, only Jingu and Oki show up for his class. The
three engage in a Godardian Q & A session wherein the kids ask him about
life and art he responds with gnomic aphorisms. It's a kind of idealized
version of the teaching experience, with two eager students lapping up Song's
wisdom (his best answer is when Oki asks why he loves his wife, he says "In life. . . Of all the important things I do, there's none I know the reason for. I don't think there is."). Later that night, after throwing up some bad octopus, Song decides to
give up teaching and go back to filmmaking ("I was a bad teacher," he cheerfully exclaims in voiceover). It's unclear if this film takes place before during or after the love triangle situation, or if one ever occurred in its world.
The fourth film (Oki's Movie) would seem to be the most
important, as it lends its title to Hong’s film as a whole. In voiceover
narration, Oki tells us this is a film about two different walks she made along
the same path in a park with two different men, one older (played by the actor
who plays Song), one younger (played by the actor who plays Jingu), two years
apart (the first, with the older man, on New Year's Eve, the second on New
Year's Day). Intercutting between the stories, she points out the similarities
and differences between the two men and her reactions to them. Pointedly, the
men are never named, we assume they are the same characters as the Songs and
Jingus we’ve seen before, because the same actors play them and they behave the
same way. But that inference is undercut by Oki’s final line: "I wanted to
see the two side by side. I chose these actors for their resemblance to the
actual people. But the limits of the resemblance may reduce the effect of the
two put together." I think she's saying that she made the film in an
attempt to sort out an experience from her past, by writing a story in which
she could see the two men she dated together and compare and contrast them, to
better understand her own experiences with them. She had an ideal of art as
catharsis, as a coming to terms with her own history. But the fact that these are
only actors means that it doesn't really help: even the greatest artist is
still only working by approximation, and without the real thing, true
understanding is impossible. Not only is the recreation never perfect, but her
perspective is necessarily limited: the best she can create is her version of her
memory of the story and the people in it.
Thus, Hong has made a film about a director who made a
series of films adopting the perspectives of each of three people involved in a
love triangle, based on a love triangle the director himself was once involved
in. And in the end, Hong, through his character the director, through his
character Oki, calls into question exactly how helpful filmmaking is as an attempt
to resolve personal issues. The motive, then, for making the movies
has to be about something more than personal revelation. Art has to go
beyond mere autobiography. The conclusion is the opposite of Alvy Singer’s in
Annie Hall, where he gives the story of his relationship with Annie the happy
ending it didn’t have in "reality" because “you're always trying to get things to
come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life.” For Alvy, the
happy ending reassures him, brings him some kind of closure and perspective on
his relationship. Closure that eludes Oki and the first Jingu. As for Hong himself, the
answer appears to be a rejoinder to critics who presume his films, about movie
directors who drink a lot and have complicated and clumsy romantic lives, are
autobiographical. Movies aren’t real, they can't be.
This leads us back to the first film. Jingu the filmmaker/professor is meeting with one of his students, giving her advice on how to improve her film. "If you don't fix it, the narrative won't support itself. Your sincerity needs its own form. The form will take you to the truth. Telling it as it is won't get you there. That's a big mistake." She accuses him of trying to impose a formal structure on her film out of greed, to make her personal statement more palatable to a mass audience. He gets angry, the form ("two turning points!") is how the filmmaker can "take away what's fake" in her. It's not by being true to life that the filmmaker expresses the truth, but in submitting truth to formal constraints truth can be uncovered. Oki will realize that she made a mistake in trying to tell it like it was.
Director Jingu, at the Q & A at the end of the first film, expresses the hope that his film "can be similar in complexity to a living thing." Answering a question about what the themes of his film are, he continues, "Starting with a theme will make it all veer to one point. We don't appreciate films for their themes. We've just been taught that way. Teachers always ask, "What's the theme?" But before asking, aren't we already reacting to the film? It's no fun pouring all things into a funnel. That's too simple." ("But people might like simple things better," the questioner responds.)
Near the end of her film, Oki tells us that "Things
repeat themselves with differences I can't understand," which is a fitting a summation of the vision of the world expressed in Hong's filmography. A world of circular narratives that bend and repeat themselves with
variations major and minor, tied to the rhythms of everyday life in all its awkward
fumbles, missed opportunities and mysteries.
