On The Beach At Night Alone

Sang-soo Hong has been getting significant praise for his latest film On The Beach At Night Alone (2017). I had previously seen Right Now, Wrong Then also starring the very fetching Min-hee Kim-who was fabulous in The Handmaiden. This film seems almost like a Korean Bergman film-it is very much dialogue driven and is about an extra marital affair between a prominent actress Kim and a director. It seems this a true life exploration where Kim has been having an affair with the married Hong and was ostracized as the woman are in Asia (this frequently happens in Japan as well-not sure why the guy gets off). The first half starts off with Kim visiting an older less attractive friend in Hamburg in an effort to get over the failed affair. Later she has a reunion with friends in Gangneung and muses about life and relationships with men as her friends also muse on their lots in life. later she has a reunion with the director that she has had an affair with. It is the epitome of slow cinema-very little happens in the film that is mostly dialogue of the self-directed kind. It was listed as one of the best 20 films of 2017 in Film Comment, an over-rated listing in my opinion.