On the Beach at Night Alone
(Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja)

With Cannes (Claire’s Camera), Seoul (The Day After) and Hamburg (On the Beach at Night Alone), Hong Sang-soo made three strikes in 2017, each time reinventing with unsurpassed grace the recurrent figures and musical scores of his previous films. This year, he has added the equally remarkable gift of ubiquity. There is no lack of common points between the three films. The same and different subtle emotion creeps in, still unexpectedly, right to a core that resists any hint of pathos. Kim Min-hee, winner of the best actress award at the 2017 Berlin Festival, serves as the link not only between the three films, but also between two sea-sides that everything keeps apart, the North (the height of exoticism!) and the resort of Gangneung, where she takes walks to recover from an unhappy love affair with a married filmmaker. Conversations between friends, dinners, alcohol and strolls follow each other, at times accompanied by the poignant gravity of Schubert’s adagio, revealing the complexity of incurable painfulness under an apparent simplicity of form. JB