Right Now, Wrong Then (2015)

People are voting emotionally.

The first must-see film of the year.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Contrary to the many Korean films I have seen lately, in which the originality, the creativity, the excellence of the stories and the great representations generally prevail, in this film all these aspects fell short of my expectations. I expected a lot more, not least because the little synopsis I read about the film was quite promising. In recent times, this was the first Korean film that deceived me. I did not feel special empathy for any character and found the performances at a level below what is normal for Korean actors and actresses.

A meta-meet-cute diptych from the prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN is set within two days and one night in the town of Suwon, an acclaimed art house filmmaker, Ham Cheon-soo (Jeong) is scheduled to give a lecture before the screening of his latest work, but he arrives one day earlier, and serendipity leads him fall in with Yoon Hee-jeong (Kim), a local young painter inside a Buddhist temple. Struck by coup de foudre, Cheon-soo tentatively asks Hee-jeong for coffee together, and she eventually agrees (on the pretense that what an honor to be accosted by such a famed directer). Chronologically from the coffee shop, to her atelier, then a sushi diner until a small gathering with Hee-jeong's friends in the night, the pair begins to know better of each other through their courteous small-talk and it is sheer in Hong's wheelhouse when he patiently employs static frames and long-takes (with sonorous music cues) to elicit the polite but tangible awkwardness between two strangers shaping up an incipient acquaintance, constantly using racking focus to point up every subtle variation of their emotions (which leans more towards Hee-jeong since she is the reactive one in the courtship), and also on the strength of two leading players' deceptively ad-libbing naturalism, consequentially, it creates an ensorcelling aura in defiance of the banal pleasantries as if we were watching a situation which would actualizes itself the next morning in front of our own eyes. When the evening ends with an anticlimactic revelation and Cheon-soo is assailed by hangover and gall during his lecture the morning after, the movie starts anew, right in the midstream and we are miraculously transferred back to the beginning and what we have watched hitherto is expunged, but with the fresh foreknowledge in our head, to watching the same narrative panning out ex nihilo but in a slightly different trajectory is a mesmerizing process, not the least if we are intrigued to discern their behavioral niceties. In the second round, Cheon-soo modulates his insincere propriety into an attitude larded with more honesty, both about his genuine feelings to Hee-jeong and to her artwork, no gobbledygook trying to patronizing her, his blunt opinion might be a flea in her ear, but in its own merit, it at least proves to her that he is not a pseud as in the first half. Also Cheon-soo reveals his marriage status in the diner sequences, where Jeong Jae-yeong tops off the protracted long-take with a stirring confession that mounts to a tremendous tour-de-force in this reviewer's eyes. How many times one can experience that sensational feeling of falling in love so completely and helplessly, to those entrapped in the insensate impasse of middle-age, which becomes a blossoming opportunity they can hardly decline. It is more telling and ironic that Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee actually precipitate an extramarital affair ignited by their first collaboration, and therefore she has become his muse both in his fiction work and in real life. The second half (now) redresses what goes awry in the first one (then), and it reaches a warm and earnest coda, where Cheon-soo successfully lures her into watching his film, because up to that point, Hee-jeong has never watched any of them, a leg-pull of Hong's own repute as an internationally celebrated name whose filmography is more heard in circulation than actually being watched by the common herd. Unpretentiously accessibly and tipsily lifelike, by and large Hong Sang-soo's RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN is a prepossessing conversation piece with an ingenious conceptual wheeze which cogently puts him on the map for cinephiles all around the globe.

I went in with low expectations, based on reviews I read, because I couldn't get in for the movie I was actually planning to watch. But it turned out to be one of the more satisfying movies I was able to catch at MAMI 2015. It's a little love story, sort of, told twice. A famous director of art-house cinema is killing time in a sleepy Korean town by visiting the one local attraction, a Palace turned into a museum. A scheduling mix has caused him to reach a day early for a planned lecture at the local film festival (yea, lot of self-referential stuff). He chats up a young woman who has given up a modeling career to become an artist. The events that follow unfold over the course of the day and the next, until his lecture and return to Seoul.There are subtle variations in how events unfold causing the male protagonist to fall flat on his face in the first telling ('Wrong then') but coming to a more fulfilling culmination in the second sequence ('Right now'). He's a cad, but the second time around, turns out to be a lovable one.Don't have too many expectations, and you will find a sweet movie.

I've been a fan of Sang-soo for some years yet his frustrating insistence to continually repeat himself is now annoying me. Sure you can guarantee failed romance and time wasted drunk in korean bars in Sang-soo films and I'm fine with that in theory.The problem I have is that everything else once you've seen a few just seems so repetitive as well... Ie the kinds of creative characters he chooses to portray, the form of the films, the dynamics between characters, the voice over narration, I could go on and on. In totality, they are just far far too repetitive for me. I was absolutely fine with all this until this film. For me this film was like the product of a once great now semi-senile 90 year old director just repeating himself after a golden age of great films decades before.He really is starting to make the decrepit Woody Allen look original! I'll probably watch the next Sang-soo film that comes out as well but with a lot more caution not expecting much.