Oki's Movie

Hong Sang-soo builds this one from four short chapters: A Day for Incantation, King of Kisses, After the Snowstorm and Oki's Movie. The same three people return in each, but the time is different, the vantage point is different, and the question of who exactly they are slides a little every time. The whole thing runs under eighty minutes. Jeong Yu-mi plays Oki, a film student caught between Jingu, played by Lee Sun-kyun, and Professor Song, played by Moon Sung-keun. The last chapter is presented as a film Oki herself has made, and it sets side by side two walks she took up the same hill with the two men: identical path, different season, different man. The comparison is as merciless as comparison always is. Hong's familiar materials are all here, the soju tables, the jealous men, the self-deceiving artists. This time the structure turns the joke back on the director, and the exhaustion in the film school scenes feels distinctly close to home. Who it is for: viewers already at home with Hong Sang-soo's games of repetition, structure and embarrassment. Who it is not for: anyone after plot, closure or likeable characters.