How many times have you fallen in love with the creation of a hitherto unknown director from the first frame of the first film of his you watch? I confess that it happens to me quite rarely. This is what happened from the first scene that opens ‘Right Now, Wrong Then‘, the 2016 film by Korean director Sang-soo Hong. Korean cinema has given me many reasons of satisfaction in recent years, but I had never encountered a film by Hong before. I understand that he writes and directs very personal films, all set in his own universe, on average about one film each year, in the style and pace of Woody Allen’s productions. ‘Right Now, Wrong Then‘ is a simple, randomly picked story from life, and at the same time a story about cinema and art, not only because its hero is a director (alter ego of the author?), but also because the way the film is structured is a subtle commentary on the art of making films and a starting point for thoughts and discussions.
The story. Jae-yeong, a well-known director of ‘art’ films, arrives due to a mis-communication a day earlier in a peripheral city where he is going to meet with spectators after their watching his film. Trying to ‘kill time’, he wanders through Buddhist temples and meets Min-hee, a young woman, a little disoriented, a little painter, whom he invites first to a coffee and then to a sushi dinner accompanied by a lot of soju liquor, to end the evening with a meeting at a cafe with the young woman’s friends. A discreet dialogue begins between the two, followed by a hesitant idyll. Love story or flirtation? The viewer has the opportunity to ask this question twice, because exactly in the middle of the film the story begins again, with the same characters and small changes.
The beauty of the film consists exactly in the differences of nuances between the two variants of the same script, with the same characters, filmed in the same places, saying approximately the same lines. And yet, the story is different, the light falls differently, the feelings of the characters differ, the emotions of the spectators change. ‘Right Now, Wrong Then‘ is a meditation on life in which the details and moods of the moment can play an overwhelming role, but it is also a brilliant cinematic exercise proving that the director’s vision and nuances added by actors to their characters can lead to more different movies based on the same script. Sang-soo Hong is a talented director who masters all the details of his craft and has assimilated the lessons of the great filmmakers. In this film we feel some of the influences of Yasujirô Ozu (long shots, some with a fixed camera, making room for the psychology of the characters) and Hsiao-Hsien Hou (the urban anxiety), but the film also has a clear Korean and personal imprint of the director in the way in which the characters fit into their social environment. The actors play with a wonderful finesse and depth, highlighting the common features and psychological variations of the two variants of their heroes. ‘Right Now, Wrong Then‘ is a film that boldly experiments in structure but retains an elegant classic in the way it is made. I was charmed.