DVD of the Week: Woman on the Beach

The filmmaker-protagonist of the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s dryly comic 2006 romantic drama, “Woman on the Beach” (which I discuss in this clip), is at work on a project of peculiar abstraction—the sort of silly idea that comes from spending too much time alone and at a desk—and is having trouble finishing his script. The adventure that follows from his efforts to unblock himself—which also entails some emotional and erotic unblocking, with two women who, he thinks, resemble each other—becomes the basis for his new film. Though “Woman on the Beach” is an intimate story, it veers into the surprising sociopolitical turf of the distinctive sexual psychology of the Korean man. Hong (who has made five features since this one) is almost obsessively devoted to the subject of the cinema—what it demands of the lives of those who make films, how the lives of filmmakers converge with their work—as well as to the question of Korean identity. Many of his characters have, or soon will, travel abroad, a decision that marks them in surprising ways. The film that he made after this one, “Night and Day,” is the first that he made outside Korea; he filmed it in France—indeed, largely in one neighborhood in Paris—and built it around the differences between national standards of romance. A few months ago, I posted here about his new project, which he’s filming in South Korea—and which will star Isabelle Huppert—and I included the trailer to his most recent film, “The Day He Arrives” (which, I’m told, will be landing in New York some time soon). It, too, deals with cinema, travels—and resemblances.

P.S. There’s a pressing need for a retrospective of Hong’s films; most of the earlier ones are inaccessible here. The most recent (“Oki’s Movie” and “HaHaHa”), superb achievements, remain undistributed.