Men, women, and a camera. These three are the essential molecules that make up a Hong film, or any given film for that matter – you might even add a cat in there just to make it a little fun. In Our Day, Hong Sang-soo’s 30th feature, has these things, and nothing else. While such minimalism meets the usual template, the perks of this structural experiment, among many variations in his career, exist in the strange translucence – it’s so brutally honest, but also so exact and so still. A Hong film has always been an exercise in creating voids instead of filling them, in capturing hidden rifts within the prosaic, in translating the otherwise un-filmic ideas and questioning where those boundaries lie. This film, likewise, holds the audience so captive in a wry combination of translucent beauty and willed sterility that there comes a point where one must ask – could this be a form of repression, or liberation? But just as they do in all of Hong’s films, this question must come as a mere rite of passage.
In Our Day juxtaposes a day in the life of two artists, an actress and a poet, as they partake in lengthy conversations with their respective colleagues and students who seek advice. Menacing big questions like “what is love?” or “what is the meaning of life?” are brought up verbatim by these naive, curious novices, and when the film then sits silently with the unabridged coverage of a cat being petted for ten minutes, an average spectator might be confused as to if that’s Hong’s way of evading the question or answering it. At the same time, the film is utterly unbothered to make connections – the two intercut sets of episodes seemingly bear no connections with each other (where one can only hypothesize that the two protagonists are blood-related). In this film, there is no usual array of chance encounters. No calculated derangements and rearrangements of time that marked Hong’s most prototypical works. No illusions. No bullshit.
This way, the “void” that Hong was always in search for is ever amplified, almost like we’ve submerged in it with the film and surrendered to its currents. It’s an exercise in languidness, but by no means does it feel truly static. The movements are there in the frame, albeit small, in the distance between the subjects of the camera and the audience looking in. The movements of gestures and emotions. The movements of our gazes as we try to study these movements. The movements of our emotions as we reject or succumb to our observations. Hong creates a void to make movements felt. He unfurls a scene to reveal its rifts, and through that space finds a conduit that connects the artist and his audience. Without rifts a film becomes a wall.
“Don’t try to find meaning,” one character proclaims. The “it-is-what-it-is” mentality of this character perhaps encapsulates Hong’s mission in cinema of giving tangible form to life as we perceive it; Hong’s films, by flattening out the artificial compartments we endow our lives such as “cause and effect,” “the self and the other,” “the past and the present,” makes us confront the “now” of all things, the brief present amidst this mortal ordeal of engaging with the world around us. It’s the attitude of an artist who would like a drag of a cigarette or a sip of cold soju in the brief dusk on a lovely evening, even though it may not make sense in the grand scheme of life. But then again, “grand schemes” have never been a real concern for Hong, only the erasure of those patterns and shapes that might threaten his cinematic spaces to become a closed curve, to become a wall.