The remarkably prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, whose film, “Oki’s Movie,” I discuss in this clip, often builds his stories around the life and work of a filmmaker. Here, he takes the premise a step further, presenting a film within a film, ostensibly made by the title character, a woman, who was the object of affection for a young man who also makes films. As Hong’s pace of work accelerated (and his budgets, to all appearances, decreased), he developed a remarkably rapid style that joins with a quietly devil-may-care audacity. In the film that he released last year, “In Another Country,” Isabelle Huppert stars as a French woman visiting South Korea—but the character is actually a figment of a young writer’s imagination and undergoes three incarnations that differ according to the writer’s fancies. There are filmmakers whose work depends on exacting and precisely realized conceptions, but most do best when they do most. Quality is inseparable from quantity, daring from the readiness and the ability to try again at once. Here in New York, we’re already a couple of movies behind. “Nobody’s Daughter Hae-Won” premièred at the Berlin Film Festival in February and played last week at the Los Angeles Film Festival (Ben Umstead’s review at Twitch makes it sound irresistible), and he recently completed another film, “Uli Sunhi.”
P.S. “Oki’s Movie” is available on DVD and also via streaming video from Amazon.
