NYFF. Night and Day.

"Following his most even-handed exploration of male-female sexual conflict in Woman on the Beach, Hong Sang-soo hurtles full-bore into the subjectivity of the horny man with Night and Day," writes Kevin B Lee in Slant. "For what it's worth, few films more knowingly illustrate the lust and confusion of the male mind."

"There's an eerie feeling in Night and Day similar to that of Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur - that human beings can be completely disposable and replaceable to some people, though this doesn't necessarily mean these people are unfeeling," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot. "Expanding and enriching his themes with layered motifs and images, filming in a straightforward style that makes the simplest pan or zoom an exclamation mark, Hong Sang-soo has never more disarmingly realized his bleak, sardonic view of male desire than in Night and Day."

For Michael J Anderson, the film "furnishes incontrovertible evidence that rumors of Eric Rohmer's retirement have been greatly exaggerated. As the third film made by an Asian master in the past two years to engage directly with French film history - along with Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon and Johnnie To's Sparrow - Hong's latest dispenses with the Korean director's trademark two-part, 'twice-told' structures for Rohmer's diaristic narrative pattern, replete with dated intertitles that are graphically-identical to those utilized in the director's 1986 masterpiece, The Green Ray/Summer. Indeed, Rohmer's Marie Rivière starrer represents one of Night and Day's most conscious sources with its initial August in Paris locale, protagonist Seong-nam's (Kim Yeong-ho) propensity to sob, and most significantly, object of desire Yu-jeong's (Park Eun-hye) declaration - following a framing emphasizing the late-day sun - that she now knows her feelings. Of course, contrary to Rohmer's work, Hong fixates on a male lead."

"In a way, Night and Day continues the narrative bifurcation of Hong San-soo's earlier work while converging towards Luis Buñuel's late period films in conflating reality with sublimated desire," writes Acquarello. "While evoking the perceptiveness of an Eric Rohmer comedy, Night and Day also suggests a loose kinship with Chantal Akerman's identically titled (and, not coincidentally, most Rohmerian) film, creating an interchangeable pattern of nights and days as a metaphor for dislocation, romantic uncertainty, and malleable identity: an ambiguity that is perhaps best reflected in Sun-nam's awkward encounters with a North Korean student, where the competition not only reflects a national consciousness over who is Korean, but is also a reminder of his glaring incongruity in a community of young people."

Glenn Kenny, writing in the Auteurs' Notebook, is reminded of "Eustache's The Mother and the Whore. Only minus the lost idealism, and filtered through some vintage Woody Allen. For this is, in fact, one of Hong's most laugh-out-loud hilarious films, largely on account of the hapless Kim, who seems constitutionally incapable of doing or saying the right thing at any given time."

"Even when his narrative introduces a bit of symbolism (a baby bird in an airport terminal, Sung-nam's arm-wrestling with a North Korean), the mood remains relaxed and artless," writes Nick Schager, "the film progressing with an engrossing spontaneity that's epitomized by magnificently understated direction which – employing natural lighting, and navigating literal and emotional space via attentive pans and zooms - makes it seem as if the camera's gaze is mirroring that of a human's eye."

"Programmer loyalty seems the only explanation for the inclusion of Night and Day, a meandering, bloated bore from the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Patience with Hong depends on patience with the following things: clumsy misogyny, drunkenness, misguided love, misguided obsession, bad-idea sex, repetition, sluggishness, melancholy, confusion, narcotized will and lots of sleeping." John Magary in the Reeler: "The days burble by on the shoulders of a passive brand of bad judgment. The films are a lot funnier than I'm making them sound."

Update, 10/14: "Not sure the film needed to run well over two hours, given its fundamentally anecdotal nature, but so many of those anecdotes are priceless that I'm not much inclined to quibble," writes Mike D'Angelo at FilmCatcher.

Updates, 10/15: "In this film and his previous one, Woman on the Beach (2006), Hong seems to be moving away from the audacious narrative trickery of his earlier work, with its doublings and repetitions and time-jumps," writes Nelson Kim at Hammer to Nail. "Here we get straightforward realism, but for a couple of brief dream scenes, one merely humorous, the other more serious in what it implies about Sung-nam's deepest desires. The film ends with a camera-tilt up into the clouds in one of Sung-nam's paintings, as Beethoven's Symphony No 7 soars on the soundtrack - a brief vision of tranquility and transcendence. But down here on the ground, things are still a sad, sorry mess."

For Alison Willmore at IFC, this "feels a lot like spending two and a half hours in the company of someone unendingly unpleasant if amusingly pathetic."

Update, 10/17: "I think that Night and Day is Hong's best film, and I'm worried that no one is going to notice," writes Dan Sallitt. "There's been a quiet style shift in Hong's recent career, and I think the new forms are coming together into something special."

Update, 10/27: "The latest in a long line of emasculated protagonists, Sung-nam is certainly the most negative manifestation of masculinity yet in Hong's filmography," writes Cullen Gallagher at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Sung-nam is spared no embarrassment or pity as he fumbles his way into unwanted relationships with women: his forcefulness is repellent, not to mention his unwavering thickheadedness."

Posted by dwhudson at October 12, 2008 9:11 AM