Bookchon banghyang

Seong-jun has made four films, but he now teaches at a small secondary school outside Seoul. He travels to the capital to pay a visit to a close friend. When the latter doesn’t answer his calls, he starts wandering aimlessly around the city; he visits an ex-girlfriend, meets another friend, film critic Young-ho, he comes across a group of youngsters and has a drink with them. In the evening he always ends up in a bar called Novel, where he chats about life, relationships and work with Young-ho, Bo-ram, who teaches film, and bar owner Ye-jeon. One of Korea’s best known and most original directors, Hong Sang-soo employs a light touch, detached insight and a sizeable dose of humour to comment not only on the film environment, which he knows inside out, but also on our attempts to give meaning to entirely random episodes in our lives. The immediacy of the acting performances and the film’s vague sense of time (certain scenes and dialogues recur in cycles) render it an interesting counterpart to the work by American director Richard Linklater, Before Sunset. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)