Woman on the Beach.

Hong Sang-soo "is nothing if not an auteur," writes J Hoberman, reviewing Woman on the Beach in the Voice. "Hong is the most Frenchified of contemporary Korean directors. His tone is droll, his mode is detached, and the essential division in his world - as Manohla Dargis noted a few years ago in the Times - is not between North and South Korea but rather between men and women. Hong's movies are predicated on awkward bullshit, symptomatic behavior, and careful camera placement. (Although his style is utterly his own, he has affinities not only with Eric Rohmer but Albert Brooks in his deadpan presentation of absurd antics.) Any of his films could be subtitled 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.'"

Updated through 1/13.

"Hong's characterizations are hard to take - they would be cruel if they weren't so fully realized, and if he weren't such a connoisseur of the acts of social sadism that can pepper our interactions with others," writes Alison Willmore at IFC News. "Shot almost entirely on the beach and in the buildings facing it, the film has a chilly air to it that's partially the director's world view, and partially just inherent to the setting: There are few things sadder than an empty, windswept resort town once the season has ended."

Updates, 1/9: "Mr. Hong has a talent for mixing the sweet and the sour, for balancing humor with heartache, levity with pain," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Wry and tender and delicately melancholic, Woman on the Beach shows a newly confident filmmaker again working near the top of his form after the disappointing Tale of Cinema (2005), even if the new film unfolds straightforwardly, with none of the narrative ellipses and puzzle-box complications, the flashbacks and parallel story lines of his earlier work. So while Woman on the Beach looks almost simple compared with films like The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), in which the stories of two estranged lovers unfold almost entirely in separate sections, there is more here - as is always the case with Hong Sang-soo - than meets the eye."

"Probably the biggest downside to Woman on the Beach (besides the cutesy piano interludes) is the consistency of Mr Hong's milieu," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Even if you haven't seen his previous movies, you might have limited patience for the hormonal blundering of this affable but self-involved main character.... Mr Hong has been more pitiless in his depiction of male flailing in the past, but the possibility of casual human cruelty comes through in a subplot about the treatment of a dog by strangers encountered on the beach. It's the kind of shift in perspective that elevates Mr Hong's films above fetishizing the very behavior they claim to dissect, by providing a window on the behavior of others that's often more of a mirror."

"Hong seems to be experimenting with the inherently comedic aspects of his familiar concerns: the awkwardness of his characters has a comic dimension this time," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "Perhaps it's just a different tonal approach to the same material; maybe, like the diagram the filmmaker protagonist draws to explain his tendency to rationalize his sexual jealousy, it's simply a matter of seeing a different shape within the same whole."

"Hong might be growing into humanism in his old age," suggests the Reeler. "If a little more formal convention is what it takes - even though he still relies upon bifurcated structure and (sometimes rote) repetitions of the same events with minor variations to make his point - so be it."

Updates, 1/11: "By the end of Woman on the Beach, we're left with complex aftertastes of desperately realistic characters, and a movie that initially looks casual but is actually a delicate synthesis of Korean and international ingredients," writes Benjamin Sutton in the New York Press.

"Woman on the Beach is assured, artful, and easily Hong's most accessible film, if only because it isn't as turtle-paced or obscure as some of his earlier work," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Update, 1/13: "Hong has been compared to Eric Rohmer, the French master of low-key, ordinary-life comedies, and if such shorthand comparisons are inherently unfair, this one fits pretty well," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Certainly the rambling, episodic plot of Woman on the Beach, which follows a group of discontented artistic types to an out-of-season resort on Korea's western coast, feels like something Rohmer would pursue. So also does the offhand, deceptively casual nature of the filmmaking, which partly veils a subtle and careful blend of humor, romantic loss and existential mystery."

Posted by dwhudson at January 8, 2008 1:13 PM