Right Now Wrong Then
Written & Directed by: Hong Sang-soo
I'm glad I discovered this filmmaker, he's referred as the Korean Woody Allen. It's disrespectful to label an artist as a derivative of another artist, even if you compare them with legends but it's fun for film buffs to do this. He is similar to Woody Allen, because he's been making 1 film a year on an average from about quarter a decade and because of his self indulgent, existential themes with filmmakers, film critics and film students as characters in most of the films. Woody Allen is self indulgent in the sense he draws from his own life all the time and his characters are mostly tweaked versions of himself. Both of them make slice of life films, in Woody Allen's films we at least have conflicts most of the times expect in a Midnight in Paris and a few more but in Hong Sang-soo's Right Now, Wrong Then there is practically no conflict. A filmmaker visits a city to screen his film and give a lecture at a film festival, he meets a girl and they go out and talk and that's the film. It's more Richard Linklater than Woody Allen in terms of the physical narrative.
The unique and probably the most radical ways of making film about Hong Sang-soo is that he starts shooting a film without a script. He wakes up everyday at 4, writes till 9 in the morning and gathers his actors and shoots the portions that he wrote that day. He lets them improvise and often gets them drunk if they have to be drunk in the scene. He uses zoom in the middle of the scene, which gives it a more realistic feel like Lars von Trier did without going out of focus and getting back in The House That Jack Built. It feels like he doesn't take his films so seriously, he wants his films to mimic life and the way life isn't interesting always, his film too just lingers for so long on the characters. His choice of scenes, makes me wonder if he is more focused on getting life experiences to be able to write and every scene feels like he'd have experienced this.
The unique and probably the most radical ways of making film about Hong Sang-soo is that he starts shooting a film without a script. He wakes up everyday at 4, writes till 9 in the morning and gathers his actors and shoots the portions that he wrote that day. He lets them improvise and often gets them drunk if they have to be drunk in the scene. He uses zoom in the middle of the scene, which gives it a more realistic feel like Lars von Trier did without going out of focus and getting back in The House That Jack Built. It feels like he doesn't take his films so seriously, he wants his films to mimic life and the way life isn't interesting always, his film too just lingers for so long on the characters. His choice of scenes, makes me wonder if he is more focused on getting life experiences to be able to write and every scene feels like he'd have experienced this.
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