a timeless journey between the walls of a small building in Seoul

The South Korean director frees himself from temporality to tell the story of several lives that intersect or overlap in a small building in Seoul.

Six months later Nowadaysreleased in July 2023 in France, the prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo returns with a new feature film in which he stages slices of the life of a director in the different spaces of a small building in Seoul . Walk up hits theaters on February 21, 2024.

Byungsoo (Hae-hyo Kwon), a famous director, accompanies his daughter Jeogsu (Mi-so Park) at the home of a long-time friend, Jiyoung (Hye Young Lee), owner of a building in Gangnam, a wealthy district of Seoul. After visiting her friend’s small building, where each room opens using an audible digital code, Byungsoo slips away under the pretext of a professional meeting in the neighborhood.

He leaves his daughter there with her old friend. The two women decide to drink wine while waiting for him. But Byungsoo is slow to return. We find him later in the small building in different companies…

Hong Sang-soo films everyday life, often around a table and a glass of wine, or even several glasses. As one of Byungsoo’s interlocutors says, “his films go well with alcohol”. Generally speaking, the characters drink and talk a lot, about little things but also about big questions, the anxieties that run through life, love, cinema or the relationship with God.

Out of time

In this apparent banality, the director enjoys losing the viewer in a temporality where reality and fantasy blur. Is Byungsoo there with us in this present, he remembers, or is he dreaming on each floor of this small building whose white walls and decorations offer a blank page to the imagination, to reverie ? Would he have let himself go during this visit to a dream which transports him in time, in the past but also in the future, on a journey where he meets the women he loved, whom he could have met or that he could love?

The main character of the film, the small building in which the characters meet acts as an interior world. The director plays with the different levels, the doors which open with a code with notes which repeat and beat the measure of a time outside of time. Closed doors, others open to the outside, represent a relationship between interiority and the outside world.

The South Korean filmmaker once again features a director, cinema and creation. If the central character of the film, Byungsoo, is a well-known director, he is nevertheless only a “fragmentary” double of Hong Sang-soo. A fictional double who questions his notoriety, who doubts, even putting a stop to his career as a filmmaker in one of the scenarios.

A director who also expresses his thoughts on the production system of 7^e art, and more broadly his point of view on an economic model: “Money is the only criterion of judgment in the world”, he says. A system whose Hong Sang-soo has extracted himself by producing his own films with great economy of means. Here he is once again screenwriter, director, cinematographer, editor, and author of the music for his film.

Torpor

In this mise en abyme of time and cinema, the director also practices a form of self-deprecation, with often very funny dialogues, staged in black and white in fixed shots which can last several minutes. Exclusively in wide or medium frame, the camera never approaches the characters, the emotions remaining at a distance, detectable in the words spoken, in the postures of the bodies, in the frugality of the settings.

Uncompromisingly ascetic, this latest radical film by Hong Sang-soo struggles to carry us away. An inventive staging, a singular narration, and the outbursts of humor are not enough to wake us from the torpor into which the film plunges us, like the main character, who ends up curling up on his bed and in his room. solitude. We have to wait for the fall, launched like a flick, to illuminate this variation imbued with nostalgia and melancholy.

The sheet

Gender : Doar
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Actors: Hae-hyo Kwon, Hye-Young Lee, Mi-so Park
Country : South Korea
Duration : 1h 37min
Exit : February 21, 2024
Distributer : Capricci Films
Synopsis : Byungsoo, a famous director, accompanies his daughter to visit a longtime friend who owns a building in Gangnam. Visiting the place takes Byungsoo on a journey out of time where his past and future loves are visible on each floor. A fine portraitist, Hong Sang-soo transforms the daily life of a building into a puzzle of human relationships. A playground that explores desires, regrets, dreams, and of course, cinema.