Woman on the Beach (2006)
The impetus for Hong’s binary structures – his trademark, despite similar doublings in other recent Asian films (e.g., Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006); Jia’s Still Life (2006)) – has been variously construed as a manifestation of the divided being of Korea, as mere narrative play, or as a modernist strategy, inherited from Resnais and Antonioni, with its attendant arsenal of themes: time and memory, and the fallibility of the latter ; the elusiveness of truth, the flux of meaning, and the unknowability of others ; and the seepage between life and art. Alas, none of these explanations appears to fit Hong, who wears his seriousness lightly. Epistemology and politics seem foreign to his fixed, restricted world of actors, artists, and professors, experts at passive aggression as they tend to their banked resentments, nursed grudges, and hidden hurts. Politics, if broached at all, is mentioned jokingly (think of the publisher who is preparing a novel about Marx in Hong’s first film, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996)), or obliquely (Kyung-soo refers to The Making of a Radical by American social-
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ist activist Scott Nearing as a life-changing text in Turning Gate but uses it merely as a prop to pursue Sun-young). Similarly, the false cues and ruses of Hong’s storytelling seem less to signify anything so profound as the dissolution of truth and identity than simply to assert an aesthetic signature: just as Godard conceives in terms of collage, Hong arranges by reiteration. Hong’s tightly battened structures belie his free approach to directing actors. The cast improvised most of the dialogue in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. Turning Gate never had a finished script, only a treatment, which was withheld from the actors before shooting began. They ‘fell into the film’ without any knowledge of the plot or characters, and received their lines for the day’s work each morning. The unnerving realism of Hong’s many scenes of inebriation – his flailing, ineffectual characters often succumb to sluices of booze – is reportedly won by occasionally getting his actors sloshed for the shoot. (Jae-hoon, in Virgin, says he used to drink five bottles of soju and three of whiskey at a