Night and Day

In Hong Sang-soo's film, Kim Sung-nam, a painter living in Seoul, flees to Paris fearing arrest after it emerges that he smoked marijuana. He telephones his wife, stays in a cheap boarding house and spends time with other Koreans. The whole film proceeds like a diary, with intertitles supplying dates. Hong's usual materials are carried somewhere else here. The man is in a foreign city where he does not speak the language, and precisely because of that he does not have to decide anything; he wanders all day, eats, approaches women, and each time narrates what he did as a moral problem. Its best quality is refusing to beautify Paris; the city looks untouristed, empty and dull, which is exactly what the character feels. It screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. Who it is for: viewers who value Hong Sang-soo's cinema of repetition and embarrassment. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for event, since the film runs close to two and a half hours and consists almost entirely of talk.