Kim Min-hee glides between strength and vulnerability in her award-winning portrayal of a young actress.
Like love itself, Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone is easy to describe, but hard to explain.
The Spotlight Cinema series concludes with Hong’s subtle meditation on love, loss and regret, made with a direct simplicity that masks its emotional depth and occasional audacity. The screening will be held at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Nov. 29 at 7 p.m.
The South Korean filmmaker has been stunningly prolific. He had made 21 features over 21 years, including three features released just this year. Hong and his films have been staples at the Wisconsin Film Festival, but he is not a household name. Maybe that will change after this month’s Film Comment cover story on Hong, which calls his films “soul-baringly intimate, formally playful, casually surreal, and surreally casual.”
Intimacy and playfulness feature prominently in On the Beach at Night Alone. A young actress, Young-hee (Kim Min-hee), visits a Korean expatriate friend in Hamburg. The two discuss their personal lives as Young-hee contemplates her troubled romantic relationship with a married man, a film director. In typical Hong style, the Hamburg section ends with an event that may or may not have happened, one of many striking ambiguities in the film. We then find Young-hee in Gangneung, South Korea, reconnecting with friends now that her film career is on hold, and her romance with the director has ended. Not much “happens,” but details accumulate, begin to echo, and finally resonate when Young-hee lets her guard down.
Stylistically, Hong remains an unflashy master of the long take, and a director willing to gamble with performance and beat changes within a shot. Ungraceful zooms and pans might seem haphazard at first, but they eventually integrate into a system through which Hong dissects and punctuates details within otherwise static scenes. The most dazzling shots involve people simply sitting at a table, as Young-hee glides between emotions. Kim won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival for her ability to toggle between Young-hee’s strengths and vulnerabilities.
I find it difficult to summarize the pleasures of On the Beach at Night Alone because they are not obvious ones. I can’t explain the last shot in Hamburg, but I can vouch for its emotional resonance and conceptual richness. I couldn’t isolate a clip to showcase Kim’s performance, because you don’t realize its power until you are in the middle of a series of transformations embedded in a long take. But once you appreciate these pleasures, little explanation is needed.
On the Beach at Night Alone is part of MMoCA’s Spotlight Cinema Series. James Kreul curates the museum’s summer Rooftop Cinema series.
