New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: IN OUR DAY 우리의 하루 (2023) (2023)


PARK MISOO, SONG SUNG-MI AND KIM HIM-HEE IN IN OUR DAY

Short scenes going back and forth between two situations

A Cannes review calls this film "less substantial and approachable" than the prolific Korean auteur's The Novelist's Film and Walk Up from last year, and called this one "fragile" and "fragmentary." All honor to those Hongists who in the press and intensity of a film festival can find the leisure and calm to contemplate this collection of short episodes in the light of the œuvre and make sense of it, and turn its minimalism and outright silliness and superficiality into profound meaning and art. This writer has tended to come up a bit short.

The spisodes are various. In the first, several women admire and feed treats to a cat and talk about acting as a profession. They are Sangwon (Hong muse Kim Min-hee, an actress who has been out of the country and has lost interest in aacting, and her hostess, Jung-soo (Song Sunmi), whose furry cat "Us" she is admiring. The third woman who comes in later is Sangwon's cousin Jisoo (Park Misoo), who has recently made the decision to focus on an acdting career. Much time is spent on the cat, whom Sangwon over-feeds treat pellets.

In another segment, a grey-bearded poet, Hong Uiji (Ki Joo-bong) talks to a young man, Jaewon (Ha Seong-guk), who has come to interview him while being filmed by a female a arts student, Kijoo (Park Miso)Th. He is having a hard time obeying orders from the doctor due to a heart ailment. He was known for smoking and drinking a lot and now he must give up both alcohol and cigarettes. He and the young interviewer exchange philosophical generalizations.

These two segments are connected through rhyming moments - climbing into single beds, guitars, and consuming ramyen with added red pepper hot sauce, declared to be a delicacy (while the relative lack of nutritional value of ramyen compared to other foods is noted.

Jonathan Romney in his Screen Daily review notes that in Hong sometimes the slightest episodes yield up interpretive riches; that he is playing with structure like a minimalist poet; that the title has no clear explanation except that the segments may all take place in a single day, and that the role of poetry - perhaps diminished - "in our time" is under consideration in the scenes with the poet-sage Hong Uiji.

There are thoughts about life here when the poet and young seeker converse. Also among the actors and would-be actors there arise big questions about art, questions of performance, reality and self-knowledge. These things are deemed to replace an actual plotline, since less is "happening" in the traditional screenplay sense in this film than normally, even for Hong. Nonetheless, devotees will delight in whatever they find here. Skeptics - among whom I count myself at the moment (though I've been all-in for Hong in the past) are more likley to feel this is a sign the Korean auteur ought to cut back on production, and wait till he has more solid material to film. Sometimes a snoert time can seem a long time and sometimes a long time can pass quickly, when it comes to film. For me the reliance on improvisation for material of such slight content led to moments of supreme vapidity.

In Our Day 우리의 하루, 83 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight; also Hamburg, Busan, a Paris premiere, and the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. Walter Reade Theater Oct. 11 & 12, 2023.