Boyfriends and Girlfriends:
Hong Sang-soo on Woman on the Beach

By Kevin B. Lee

The protagonist of Hong Sang-soo’s new film Woman on the Beach is a director at a crossroads in his career. Could the same be said of Hong? It’s been ten years since his debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996); six features later, he is a regular on the international festival circuit (the ultra-exclusive New York Film Festival has programmed the newest Hong release each of the last three years). Ever since A Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) and Turning Gate (2002) startled festival-goers with their highly studied yet playful examination of sexual relationships, a small but intensely appreciative fan base has had high expectations for the day Hong—who’s sometimes billed as Korea’s answer to Eric Rohmer—becomes a household name.
                                                     
It hasn’t quite happened so far: Only one Hong film, Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), has secured distribution in North America. It’s no surprise that an Asian director who doesn’t trade in action flicks is given short shrift internationally, no matter that he studied in the US and counts Rohmer, Buñuel, Renoir, and Bresson among his influences. But even in South Korea, Hong’s films have failed to break out of the small arthouse circuit, despite his routinely casting popular Korean film and TV stars as his leads. Perhaps the rigorous formalism of his films, and their sobering takes on love and relationships as a function of ego and selfish desire, leave audiences unsettled. Of course, that unease is precisely what Hong is after. Although his scenes are as meticulously composed as any to be found today, his cinema is as restless as his male protagonists: considering and reconsidering the significance of an event, an offhand statement, or a throwaway gesture, and never fully satisfied with what it finds. The result has been one of the most consistently uncompromising filmographies in recent memory.

What does it mean, then, that a common phrase found in reviews of Woman on the Beach is “Hong’s most accessible film to date?” The film’s plot is Hong’s closest to pure genre (in this case a romantic comedy of errors), and it is undoubtedly his funniest film. In Hong’s characteristically bifurcated manner, he juxtaposes two love triangles, both involving the struggling film director Kim Joon-rae (Kim Seung-woo) and the object of his hot-and-cold affection, music composer Kim Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-joung). In the first half, Joon-rae successfully woos Moon-sook from his own production designer, Won Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo), in a hilarious succession of subtle power plays among the trio. Post-coitus, Joon-rae finds himself disillusioned with Moon-sook and leaves the beach resort, only to come back days later in search of her. Instead he finds Choi Sun-hee (Song Sun-mi), who bears a striking resemblance to Moon-sook, and ends up with her in the same hotel room. When Moon-sook arrives and starts pounding at the door in a drunken fit, the situation seems ripe for overt farce. As always, though, Hong underplays the action, lingering on the unbearably awkward moments when people find themselves at amorous cross-purposes while nudging the viewer towards a more reflective consideration of these tabloid-worthy entanglements.

Though Hong’s lucid direction places Woman on the Beach well above a conventional romantic comedy, some Hong aficionados, as well as detractors, are nonplussed by this decidedly more audience-friendly offering, seeing the film as slack, digressive, and not as rigorously constructed as his earlier works. To some Hong purists, the use of ’70s-style zooms to focus on individuals within a scene is a weak variant on his rare gift for using staging to redefine relationships within a shot. In one scene, which easily ranks among the most memorable of Hong’s films, director Kim uses a geometric diagram to explain why he cannot continue his relationship with Moon-sook. The scene routinely elicits howls of laughter from audiences, but some of Hong’s longtime fans feel that it spells out too much of the analytical properties of Hong’s work (he’s “moving into Woody Allen territory,” as one online reviewer puts it).

Woman on the Beach may represent a move towards a more commercial mode of storytelling, but it’s premature to write it off as a case of selling out. The film resumes the inquiry of Hong’s previous film, Tale of Cinema, by examining the role of film in facilitating man’s relationship with himself and others. Director Kim utilizes his status to woo both of his romantic interests; he even conducts an interview with Sun-hee under the premise that she reminds him of a character he is writing. With his brusque behaviour and constant manipulations, Kim treats his life as a movie set or a work of art which he must endlessly sculpt to match his own insatiable vision.
                                                                                                                               
The aforementioned diagram scene makes explicit Hong’s career-long concern with the persistence and limitations of perception; what is new and exciting about Woman on the Beach is the degree to which Hong makes room for more than one character’s set of perceptions and personal flaws. This is especially true with Moon-sook, who appears at first solely as an object of desire; director Kim casually dismisses her opinions even as he tries to seduce her. There’s been ongoing debate over the degree of objectification of women in Hong’s films, whether as foils for male lust or as long-suffering, somewhat idealized counterparts to male idiocy. Here, though, Moon-sook develops into a three-dimensional being, with enough insecurities and desires to rival Hong’s catalogue of badly behaving men. By the end, she literally drives away with the film in a brilliant shift of audience identification. While Kim seems consigned to repeat his rituals of artistic and sexual listlessness, Moon-sook experiences a feeling of liberation and rediscovery of self that, while expressed with Hong’s characteristic mutedness, is worthy of a Roberto Rossellini–Ingrid Bergman film. Comparing the two protagonists, one hopes that Hong Sang-soo is taking to heart the title of another of his films: that, perhaps, woman is truly the future of man.

CINEMA SCOPE: What was the inspiration for making Woman on the Beach?

HONG SANG-SOO: When I first conceive the idea for a film, I usually come up with a kind of everyday situation. For me, it has to contain something that I just know instinctively that, if I dig into the situation, the result will reveal some of the tensions, dilemmas, the things I like to deal with. This time, the situation was that I had known a woman who was working in the film industry. And then one day I went to the countryside and there was a restaurant on the roadside. A woman was working there and I just saw her face and she reminded me of this woman. For a few minutes I felt like I knew her, so I was touching her arm and asking “How are you?” I felt this affinity. Even though I knew it was absurd, it stuck in my mind. So when I was thinking of what film I wanted to make, this situation came to me. I don’t know if the film answers that original mystery, but that situation laid the ground work for the process of making the film.

SCOPE: Your films are very consistent in their style and content, but I’ve noticed subtle new approaches in your recent work. What did this film offer in terms of new challenges or approaches?

HONG: I don’t intend to change my style. I don’t have this preconceived schedule for my progress as an artist. I have a situation, and then a form comes to me, and some details come through. Then I write out a treatment that contains about 50 or 60 percent of the details. Then I meet the actors and actresses and do location scouting, and all these people and locations inspire me. And the filming takes care of the rest. If this film shows something different from my previous films, then that is a natural outcome due to the people I met, which location I was in, how old I am. It’s a response to these elements. I don’t have an idea of what kind of things I would change.

SCOPE: Let’s take, for instance, the close-up of the diagram that appears near the end of the film. Isn’t this the first insert shot in any of your films?

HONG: There is a small insert shot in my first film, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. But this one is quite different; it’s much longer.

SCOPE: You’ve also been using zooms more frequently in the last two films. How did you develop that approach to composing your scenes?

HONG: I waited until the first day of shooting to decide whether I would use the zoom or not. I have these feelings inside, and if the time is not right, they won’t come out. So with Woman Is the Future of Man, I was thinking of using the zoom, and I talked with the cinematographer about it. The first day, I didn’t feel like it, I couldn’t use it. But with Tale of Cinema, the first day, I felt I could.

SCOPE: It just seems that, with these new techniques evident in your films, your cinematic vocabulary seems to be more complex.

HONG: I don’t feel it is more complex—it’s just different. It’s a reflection of what I am at a certain moment. Perhaps I’m more complicated.

SCOPE: Like your other films, this film acknowledges the filmmaking process, this time with the scene where the director interviews two women at the table. Did you do any of that sort of interviewing for this film?

HONG: I always wish that I could do more interviews with real people, but I’m kind of lazy. In my career, I think I’ve only approached people on the street twice. But with the actors and actresses I do a lot of interviewing, about twice a week. I need to get a kind of picture of the person, not as an actor but as a person. I don’t want to be influenced by who they are or what they’ve done as an actor. I try to feel them as real people—as if I were meeting them for the first time. It takes about a month, usually. And then with that picture and the details I had in my treatment before I started casting, I take them and mix them throughout the shoot. I shoot in sequence, so the things I did yesterday will influence today’s shooting.

SCOPE: Given that sexual differences and tensions are so prevalent in your films, do you work with the actors differently than with the actresses?

HONG: The difference between two actors is no bigger or smaller than the difference between an actor and an actress. Their characters all have desires, and they all try to fulfill them.

SCOPE: But in that regard, in all your previous films, desire and subjectivity are more weighted towards the male characters. And this film ends with a woman alone pursuing the path towards her own fulfillment.

HONG: Again, it’s my response to the locations and the actors. If I chose a different actress or actor, I might have come up with a different ending. I have some of the details, and then I shoot this person, and my response to this person and what she gives me makes up the next day’s storyline. One important factor contributing to that particular ending is who she is in real life. If you have too much conceptualization, the options in terms of where you get details are restrained, because of this strong outline. Of course we need some kind of outline, but I really like to pick up details from other places beyond the main dramatic points. For me, those dramatic points are not the centre. It’s up to you how you connect them. The details come from an unusual place and make a pattern, but patterns don’t necessarily have a symbolic meaning. That’s not my intention. My job is just to make a complex pattern so people can feel something that is alive. I can think of a person [points at a woman]—let’s say you and I met her and after two hours you can talk about her this way and I can talk about her that way. Because she is a living being, we can say different things about her. That’s as far as I want to go, rather than telling you what to feel.

SCOPE: What you’re describing about seeing a bigger picture is reminiscent of the diagram the director draws near the end of the film. How was that diagram scene conceived?

HONG: I felt I needed to show something inside the main character, the problem that’s inside his head.

SCOPE: The fact that your protagonist is a film director seems to invite the audience to make autobiographical associations.

HONG: It’s not like I’m speaking my philosophy through him. It’s hard to distinguish between what his personality is and the influence that I have. It’s so intermingled. I didn’t really care for making a new profession for my protagonist. People around me gave advice, telling me that if you changed his profession you’d grow more by exploring people different than yourself, but I didn’t listen to that advice. What I do with the character is more important than his profession. When I choose a character’s profession, it intrinsically forms expectations about what he can and cannot do. If he is not a director, he cannot go up to a stranger and ask for an interview. When I chose to make him a director, I didn’t know I was going to have him conduct these interviews.

SCOPE: Some are saying that this is your most accessible film. Can you see how this could be seen as more accessible, or do you even think in terms of audience accessibility?

HONG: I started thinking about that after the last picture, Tale of Cinema. I had a desire as a filmmaker to keep digging deeper into myself, discovering new things about what my true realm really is. Of course, the other desire is to communicate with others. Maybe it’s my age, but a small voice was asking me when I was shooting, “Will they understand this?” I didn’t have that kind of voice before.

SCOPE: Do you think that voice may be due to the limited box-office success of your films in Korea?

HONG: Perhaps. Another reason is age. I am not the same person I was ten years ago. Now I seem to think less of myself and more about what others think.

SCOPE: That may reflect how this film begins with one protagonist, the director, but then shifts focus to the first woman he seduced.

HONG: You may see that as a sign of progress...

Woman on the Beach

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