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Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea): 71

Almost busted out laughing when our hero pointed out the Musée d'Orsay at one point, thereby reminding me of Hou's cosmopolitan visit to France just last year -- and underlining the fact that Hong flew all the way to Paris to make a movie in which spotting a non-Korean face amounts to a rousing game of Où Est Waldo? Certainly expatriation only makes his protagonist perhaps 10% more bemused and adrift than usual. For some reason, however, it makes him 200% more hilarious, even though the film is utterly devoid of the routine culture-clash comedy one might expect. Like early Jarmusch, Night and Day functions almost like a series of blackout sketches, minute variations on a theme; the interstitial date cards themselves gradually turn into miniature punchlines, emphasizing the degree to which this quizzical, indolent lump -- a renowned artist who does nothing for two solid months apart from lie in bed, smoke cigarettes and very hesitantly chase girls -- proves temperamentally impervious to change. Nothing new for Hong, of course, but the tone here is subtly different -- which is to say, oddly funny and disquieting -- right from the opening scene, in which Sung-nam, fresh off the plane, is warned, apropos of nothing whatsoever and in broken English, to "be careful." That he proceeds to treat Paris like a potential minefield, behaving like a dog who's accidentally wandered out of its own neighborhood, friendly but uncertain, just gets funnier and funnier. 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. I do have a question, though, for anyone who speaks both English and Korean: What the hell is going on in that scene where the subtitles have Sung-nam speaking in some kind of weirdass sexist jive? Just how untranslatable is that, and why?

Posted on 10/08/08 by: dangelo 07:55 PM