With his debut, Hong Sang-Soo won a Tiger Award in 1997. In his 12th feature, structured as four short films about a three-cornered relationship, he narrates with ironic wisdom about the differences between men and women, jealousy, dipsomania, cinematic art and related neuroses.
Hong, who won a Tiger award in 1997 with his feature debut The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, has for years made films about men wrestling with themselves. Here it is in the playful form of a comic-romantic four-part story about making a film, set around a Korean film school with all its machinations and gossiping.
While Professor Song has declared film dead as art, Jingu - a thoughtful, dipsomaniac filmmaker in crisis - tries to stay on his feet in a three-cornered relationship with female student Oki. Despite financial problems, Jingu manages to make a short film, after which he is thrown to the lions in a hilariously embarrassing Q&A in the cinema.
Apart from being a successful comedy, Oki’s Movie is also a plea to regard film as art and to throw overboard such restrictions as having a theme. Most memorable is the scene in a classroom where Jingu and Oki bombard the professor with questions: 'Am I a good person?' and 'What do you most want to do in life?'
A Short Profile of Hong Sang-Soo by Ioana Salagean, student MA Film Curating at the London Consortium:
As early as 1996, the IFFR’s seminal discovery of The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well signalled the beginning of a new era. Contemporary art-house criticism revelled in the idea of establishing a new trend and the boom in Asian cinema was a direct result of this compelling find. It is hard to envisage what Hong would have managed to produce if he hadn’t gained access to the worldwide festival circuit.
If Hong were to direct a film called 'The Return of the Tiger', the result would probably be slightly abstract, funny and evidently blessed with the sweet charm of meaningful digressions. It is highly probable that both ‘tigers’ and ‘returns’ would be entirely absent from the film. Yet the overall atmosphere of the piece would be poignantly there, to indicate situations of absence and presence.
There is something enticingly different about Hong’s cinema. It simply does not fit into the stereotypical notion of what a Korean production is supposed to ‘represent’. The charged energy of kinetic violence and the provocative and descriptive eroticism are not in any way graphic: the 'charge' comes from the characters, from their normality, their futility and day-to-day meandering through urban psychosis. Indeed, what distinguishes Hong from other directors of his generation is this sense of ordinariness, the pedestrian (out)look of his world. Hong is both looking in and looking out with the same sense of reserve and unapologetic exploration. There is no need for pomposity or even factual demonstration: everything happens in this deranged microcosm, which happens to be a real, intimate corner of (our) human existence. Hong does not directly provoke the extraordinariness of our everyday life; rather, he waits, patiently and often amused.
Yet there is more to Hong’s playfulness than his sarcasm. Self-reflexivity and juicy inter-textuality work to underline his down-to-earth cinematic technique and mosaic narrative structure. Hong’s approach is extremely relaxed. There is no lengthy development of script: stories can and should be reversed, written on the day of the shoot, improvised with the actors, etc. This intriguing cinematic dandyism suits him nicely. Many sequences manage to capture this freshness, this surprise element of dissatisfaction, of imperfect or unformed meanings, of interrupted or failed communication between people.
In this respect, Oki’s Movie is a standard Hong Sang-Soo treat. His employment of multiple points of view - his treatment of sexual impulses as they unravel, the complicated status and outcome of relationships - all highlight the contradiction and (mis)match between characters. The plot is recognisably a centrifugal narration evolving from a ‘failed’ - or rather unaccomplished - act: the fulfilment of sexual impulses. The story is divided into four fragments, each pertaining to a unique viewpoint. A girl must make a choice between two men. The outcome could be disastrous, and yet...