Nobody's Daughter Haewon (2013)

 

Director: Sang-soo Hong

Screenplay: Sang-soo Hong

Cast: Jung Eun-chae as Haewon; Lee Sun-kyun as Seongjun; Joon-Sang Yoo as Jungshik; Ji-won Ye as Yeonju; Ja-ok Kim as Jinju; Eui-sung Kim as Jungwon; Jane Birkin as Jane Birkin

Canon Fodder

 

Hong Sang-soo, for a long time, was an enigmatic figure in cinema, a cult in him for film critics. It did not help his filmography, prolific since 1996, was not available in the United Kingdom. He is still elusive but thankfully, there have been more chances to see his work: Film4, a British television channel devoted to films, screened a season of his work¹. MUBI has helped as a streaming site, and Arrow Pictures released two of his films as a double bill. And the follow, Nobody's Daughter Haewon, was the first film of his in the DVD age to get a proper theatrical release followed by physical release.

This is an issue as, controversially, I feel the only way for Hong Sang-soo to fully work as a creator is to not view one film as its own separate entity, but that they all co-exist, from a South Korean director of minimalist dramas and comedies, as one single film. Never was there a director who had single-mindedness this extreme, following the auteur theory that a director is a creator like an author. Once he got to the point of making films continually on a yearly basing, from 2008 to the modern day, Sang-soo gestated various themes that repeated. Dramas with comedic touches and comedies of awkward errors which belong in neither genre; usually a character who is a film director or involved with films; book stores, as Sang-soo is obsessed with them; romances and adultery; soju, the Korean national alcoholic drink; drinking of said soju, usually at restaurants with the ability to cook your own food on the table, likely to lead to drunken confessions. When he got popular he also started had international stars, especially Isabelle Huppert, but here Jane Birkin takes the position for a cameo.

To talk of Nobody's Daughter..., both as a separate film and a piece of his whole filmography, it is best to explain it in context of Birkin's cameo, as that is the first significant scene of the film and contextualises the structure of the film. Meeting Jane Birkin, and bonding over her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, suddenly Birkin as herself becomes close to Haewon immediately, only for it to have been a daydream for her with her head laid across a table by books. Another fascinating aspect of Sang-soo, which repeats over his films, is that whilst he makes very minimalist and universal stories (of conflict, romance and restless adults), he plays with structure greatly even if he never drastically changes the film medium visually or in openly avant-garde ways. For Haewon's tale, there is a lot of this narrative made entirely subjective in what are her dreams and what is real, following a young film student whose mother has moved to Canada, whilst she is in the midst of an adulterous relationship with a married man who is her film teacher.

Beyond this, the tale of Haewon is deceptive. Sang-soo is a director who stresses the dialogue, static takes with the only pronounced visual aspect extensive use of zoon lens for emphasis. Sang-soo's characters are complicated, imperfect people who drift along between life and nights drinking at restaurants, not even the film director a figure separate from this world. High art contrasts the ordinary environments, and a large of Nobody's Daughter... takes place in the mountains where old fortifications, the ancient Namhan Fortress, are now where people visit centuries later, to have picnics and get into conflicts over their relationship when one's wife has kicked you out of the house. If this review is slight, it is only because Hong Sang-doo's films feel like they should bleed together, a director you build the picture up from with reviews of each film for contrast.

He repeats his motifs, and far from a creative problem, this creates pieces which together contrast and add a great deal, as character will repeat their mistakes over and over, yet also the little pleasures (drinking and art) will be ruminated on without pretentious monologues. Young women are common protagonists too, Haewon a figure adrift especially with her mother's absence, someone who we see she was very close too from a long scene together, jovial and close as they joke about Haewon being able to participate in the "Miss Korea" beauty pageant with fake catwalk strutting in the middle of a park. Haewon is a figure prone to a lot of moments of sleeping when studying, a motif repeating the shot of her asleep and causing one to wonder as a viewer what is real and what is very much her daydreaming more interesting dramas in her life, never shown what is fabricated. Even among her fellow students, she is an outsider, someone mentioning her being mixed race (which another objects to being brought up when that should not be an issue), and others bringing up her being more well off with a class divide, a snobbery that disconnects her to them. This conversation is when she just leaves their table in a restaurant briefly and talk behind her back drunkenly, a lonely soul wandering in her own world and (unless dreamt up) with merely a romance with a married man which is just awkwardly moving forth. She is not necessarily a good student in the film class, or behind in her assignments, so she is not in the best of places even there.

Sang-soo's work, the more times I am actually able to see it, grows as a result and aspects of this film even beyond those mentioned reverberate to others, even if (fittingly for his structural games) I may have accidentally misremembered or faked memories of the other films. For example, the scenes of Namhan Fortress here evoke scenes in countryside from Oki's Movie (2010), one of the first of his work I saw as part of the Film4 season. His work is also never grim, which is poignant, his characters flawed but compelling, even tragically humorous such as the teacher who is reduced to tears on a bench kicked out of two women's lives. His is a world of people who open up too easily after a lot of soju in vast qualities and it says a lot, that he is not a director interested in over the top drama or making anything in a genre, whilst is also why his films have probably been unfairly maligned for a long time in wide availability. He is very unlikely to stray into pulp genre films anytime soon, although it would be interesting to see what peculiar creation Hong Sang-soo would do. It says a bit that the only time he ever got indulgent, turning into one of his own characters when caught out in an adulterous affair with one of his actresses Kim Min-hee², was trying to open up himself about that through her as a proxy in On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). In a film like Nobody's Daughter Haewon however, for contrast, it is a slow burn, compelling but difficult to say either drama or comedy, just a tale of human interaction which grips.

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1) As chronicled of HERE.

2) As documented of HERE.