Right Now, Wrong Then

When is then and when is now? And what is right and what is wrong? These are essential questions in Right Now, Wrong Then, the dryly humorous story, told twice, about the filmmaker Ham Cheonsoo, who travels to Suwon for a Q&A. There he meets the young female painter Yoon Heejuong. They stroll, talk, eat sushi and drink much too much soju. Maybe this is the beginning of a romance. Hong’s films have often been compared with Groundhog Day; here too, stories that repeat themselves and characters who find themselves in a time loop. But Right Now, Wrong Then is also about looking and about how we remember having seen something. You only have to move the camera a little, to add a voice-over, to allow a scene to run a little longer, and you have a very different film. A beautiful puzzle about how we can never step twice into the same river.
Film introduced by a video essay by Kevin B. Lee.