Another genius film from the Korean master. It's enigmatic title points to a form of being amidst the abjection of life that only becomes possible through our relationships with the opposite sex.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

With Hong Sang-soo's films it can be easy to get carried away with interpretations that have a tendency to go too far, to the point where what one thinks they see in the film doesn't come from experience while watching it, but from meaning that has been re-read back into it. This compels one into a process whereby the logic of the structure is compared against what one experienced at the moment of watching the film so that their interpretation can be validated against it; and likewise, the feelings provoked during the watching of the film become phenomena comparable against what one later understands as the structure of the film.

As is usually, if not always the case, in Hong Sang-soo's films, there are certain metaphorical/symbolic elements that occur within them, certain statements that carry more significance than their place in whatever (usually intellectual) discussion in which they occur. For instance in this film, there is both the issue of the cracked tooth of the girl (the blowjob feels so good because of it) and then this scene in the restaurant at the end where the professor gets angry at the student's attempt to diminish his question about the last time one of the girls had had sex, as part of a drinking game they are playing. The student tells him it is 'course' to make such statements, to which the professor replies that, 'what, you think you're classy or something? Its only a concept, what you are talking about. Those ideas of class and the certainty of ethical and moral codes are only the product dead people's self-promotion'.

So, both of these, the cracked tooth and the dialogue on 'classiness' are the two main points of reference for determining the meaning of the film. Unlike, for instance Woman On The Beach, or The Day He Arrives, there isn't an elaborate structure of repetitions to the film from out of which to base a more complex interpretation. This film is more or less as it seems: that professor Lee, as opposed to director Kim, was always able, and is still able, to live with life that doesn't conform to what he expects (e.g., he sees his wife everyday less and less like a wife, but just as a human being). Like the triangles that are drawn in Woman On The Beach, when a series of events in our life forms the shape of an image we don't expect, one that is imperfect, we aren't able to accept it, we are repelled by it. However, in this film, for professor Lee, rather than being unable to cope with the unnatural image of a woman who is raped and 'impure', he is able to accept those aspects of her that don't conform to the normal view of womanhood or beauty (the haircut for instance) and to still take comfort in precisely that fact. The joy of, or pleasure in compromise of living our lives as they are rather than how we would prefer them to be—to believe in, as the professor tells us, nothing so that we avoid being caught up in images of how life should be that burden us and prevent us from truly experiencing what there is.

On the path of nothingness, as the film gives us just a glimpse, rather than there being no life one can lead, there is still a rich life to be found, one of honesty, resolve, earnestness. One where, even though the student and professor are discovered as they take a room in a hotel, they are able to calmly think through what has happened and how best to approach it the next day in school so that the professor doesn't end up getting screwed by this other student and his 'shit-stirring'. Once we accept life as it is, the film shows us, it doesn't end, but the problems is gives us become ones of a different sort. Rather than a play of images, of movement with respect to a position on one image or another, life becomes rather those movements and avenues for movement that are available to us based on the truth of who we are and those around us that act and respond to things in certain ways based on who they truly are. This is an affect-based emotional logic rather than an objective, rational one, one that occurs through the cracks and fissures of imperfect rational images rather than over against those imperfections according to their ideal forms.

It is in this sense that woman is the future of man, to the extent that we mean real women and not what we want them to be—women who have their own compromises, their own flaws that always make them imperfect. And then the true man who sees his own flawed humanity and is able to accept this and, more than that, becomes what he is as a flawed person only through this form of relationship. That the level of honesty, resolve, determination a man has in order to enter into this type of relationship is what makes him a man rather than, for instance, a running-away baby complaining about how he didn’t get a bit of sleep because of the way in which the woman he once loved but was never able to truly accept was behaving in a way that didn't match up with his proper image of woman (as the director does).

This film gives us just a small insight into the beginnings, as Scorsese says in the introduction to the American DVD, of an entirely other way of being. It is a form of being amidst the abjection of life—a life that is irreparably compromised, flawed, and that cannot be brought back into conformity with whatever one might think it should be. We are all just human beings doing our best to survive, and the film is just one instance of what one might consider to be a radically secular form of existence. It is a perspective on life and existence—a philosophy on how best to live, and how not to in the world that we have rather than the one we think we should—one that arises through the duration of watching some flickering light emerge from out of a complex network of technologies, rather than from a monk in some monastery. It is one of the most clear and truthful expressions of how who we are as people inextricably tied to our relationships with one-another. And, perhaps, most importantly, tied to our relationship with the opposite sex, through which we even have the possibility to become anything at all.

*Note: this is an edited version of a previous version.