Her Return Day Review – Hong Sang-soo’s Another Round of Slow, Reflective Drinking Really Hits the Spot | film

IIt will come as no surprise to fans of acclaimed Korean artist Hong Sang-soo that his new black-and-white film — which might be described as “experimental” by those who aren’t quite aware that they all look like that — features long scenes, shot from a single fixed camera position, and involving a conversation in a restaurant. They also won’t be surprised that one of these scenes has a sudden and unobtrusive zoom-in to a closer position, for no apparent reason.

It will come as no surprise to them that the film features someone playing a screen star of a certain age who thinks philosophically about her career and life choices (a key Hong trope). And it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if the movie had a character order a beer or two before the sun even technically goes down. There is no one in the movies, in any of the arts, or in any aspect of public life, anywhere in the world, more devoted to daytime drinking than Hong Sang-soo.

The mannerisms are all there, but to me, they come together more satisfyingly here than in some of his other recent works; It has an endless amount of mystery and intrigue, starting with the mystery of the title.

Song Seon-mi plays Jeong-su, a famous actress in her 40s who apparently took a break from her career due to motherhood and then divorce, and returns as a single mother in an independent film that she is now interviewing about. There are three of them, back to back, and the interlocutors are almost interchangeable, which is one of the film’s almost undetectable structural jokes. They are well-spoken and respectable women, about 15 years younger than Jeong-soo; They’ve clearly been instructed by their editors to focus on the human side, asking not so much about the movie — which we don’t really know anything about, which is another implicit joke — but how Jeong-soo feels.

You ask the interviewers if they would like to have a beer. Most of them say no. She is uncomfortable answering questions about the divorce at first, but then opens up and cries, advising the young woman not to live without love. When an interviewer tells her about a fight she just had with her boyfriend, Jeong-soo seems to relax, even though this interviewer congratulates her on “the cold, childish aura she exudes… like a little kid.” There are two “intermission” scenes between the three interviews, where Jeong-soo smokes or smokes outside, worried that she’s said too much. Next, she shows us that despite her pleasant demeanor, she is as strict as any Hollywood diva, calling one of the interviewers on her mobile phone, requesting that some answers be deleted, and even requesting approval for transcription.

So far, the film feels like a gentle satire, not far removed from the scenes of Hugh Grant interviewing the Horse and Hound in Richard Curtis’s comedy Notting Hill. Many Reality stars have commented on the surreal, punishing experience of doing a series of interviews and feeling like they’re all gone in one interview. But then, Jeong-soo goes to the acting class she told an interviewer about; This wasn’t just part of some thoughtful pantomime of modesty, she really owned the class. Her first assignment is an autobiographical one: to recreate the interviews she has just conducted, with a classmate who plays the role of a journalist. Interestingly, Jeong-soo integrates the three conversations as best she can, but begins to include things she didn’t say—Buddhist observations about what is real and what is unreal, and about when and whether one fully experiences life.

This fourth conversation, so far from being an overtly or dramatically fictionalized version of the first three, is quite their equal. It is no more contrived than these first three encounters and is more likely to result in real self-knowledge. There are no close-ups or stabs of music to let you know that something important is happening in Jeong-su’s head, as there might be in another kind of film, and the fact that she drinks a few beers isn’t portrayed as wrong, reckless, or even necessarily of great importance. The conversation begins at a consistent volume, tempo, and tempo. The film withholds overt meaning like a short story…and is quietly interesting.