Night and Day (Bam gua Nat)
Shot mostly in Paris, Hong Sang-Soo’s droll movie chronicles the emotional/sexual drift of a Korean émigré who misses his wife but finds himself falling for a much younger woman.
The first film Hong Sang-Soo has shot substantially outside Korea, Night and Day turns less on tricks and traps of structure than his other movies but finds just as much humour in patterns of repetition and variation. It's presented as a kind of diary. Middle-aged painter Kim Sung-Nam fetches up in Paris, paranoid that he was about to be arrested for smoking dope in Korea. Unable to speak French, he lodges in a fairly seedy hostel for Korean émigrés in the 14th arrondissement and wanders aimlessly around the city, periodically calling his wife back in Seoul.
On the rebound from a disconcerting encounter with a needy ex-girlfriend (now unhappily married and eager to pick up where they left off), he runs into a Korean art-student and her alluring flatmate and finds himself falling in love… Eric Rohmer's name has been bandied about as a point of reference, but this is actually pure Hong Sang-Soo: a very amusing deconstruction of male pride, male inadequacy and the male capacity for projecting hapless fantasies on to more or less innocent women. Not a reinvention, then, but a thoroughgoing refreshment of Hong's characteristic themes.
Tony Rayns
| Directed by: | Hong Sang-Soo |
| Written by: | Hong Sang-Soo |
| Cast: | Kim Young-Ho, Park Eun-Hye, Hwang Su-Jung |
| Country: | South Korea-France |
| Year: | 2008 |
| Running time: | 143min |
