OKI-EUI YONG-HWA

Hong Sang-soo’s new film (his second one this year) presents itself as a series of four short films, each with its own title and credits (A Day for Incantation, King of Kisses, After the Snowstorm and Oki’s Movie), but actually knits together to form one story about a young woman who dates two very different men. Oki is studying film in a college in Seoul and has an affair with her professor, Song. Two years later, she gets involved with fellow student Jingu – which provokes Song’s jealousy and causes him to give Jingu low marks for his course work. We meet the two men in the first chapter; Jingu is now married to a woman who resents most things about him and has a faculty job alongside Song, whom he continues to irritate. The other three chapters look back a few years to the time of the affairs with Oki; the last is her own short movie in which she compares her experiences of the two men on excursions to Mount Acha. As you would expect from Hong Sang-soo, much soju is drunk, neurotic insecurity proliferates, and the chasm between men’s and women’s experiences opens pretty wide. Of course, it’s all done with sardonic wit, laugh-out-loud humour and wry embarrassment. (Tony Rayns)