Woman is the Future of Men

In this film, Hong Sang-Soo refines the mix of social realism, psychological demolition and formal play that he’s been honing ever since his début feature, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. Aspiring film director Heonjun, just back from film school in the States, meets up with his former classmate Munho, now a married university lecturer. Both men are lurching towards premature middle age and, despite years of higher education, neither knows much about himself. Watching a striking woman on the wintry pavement outside the coffee shop turns their self-deluding thoughts to Sunhwa, a girl they both once dated, and they decide to look her up in the bar she runs in Bucheon, a suburb to the south of Seoul. But unreliable flashbacks reveal that they remember Sunhwa very differently, and when they find her, it turns out that she has rather more objective reasons for not wanting to see either of them again… As usual, Hong dots the film with internal symmetries and parallels to suggest how our lives may be more ‘programmed’ than we like to believe. This time his title comes from a poem by Louis Aragon, chosen almost at random, but it’s certainly true that the woman in his story has more to look forward to than the men do. Hong’s amused sense of the way his characters hide their lack of self-awareness under streams of banal small-talk has never been sharper or funnier. (TR)