Hong Sang-soo's latest film explores the complexity of our experience of time and of the strange temporality of provisionality that is pervasive in today's era of globalisation of culture and language.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mori: Time is not a real thing like my body, your body, this table. Our brain makes up the time-frame of continuity, past, present, future. I think you don't need to experience life that way, necessarily, as a species.

Mori: Yes, but being polite and clean is just being polite and clean, its not something you love or respect. I hate how some Koreans, like those teachers, who are just so low; but the person I respect most in the whole world is also a Korean...so, I don't want to talk about Korean people in general; its stupid to talk about that kind of thing.

Hong Sang-soo's film Hill of Freedom is an interwoven montage of two seemingly distinct narratives: a narrative where Mori, a Japanese man, is in Korea to find a Korean woman he met some years ago; and a narrative of everything that takes place during his stay there, including his conversations with the owner of the guesthouse he stays at, the bankrupt nephew of the owner with whom he goes for drinks, makes friends, meets an American living in Korea, and, most importantly perhaps, when he befriends and eventually sleeps with the woman working at the same café where he writes a letter to the Korean woman he loves and where he reads a book on time.

However, the structure of the film is more complex than this. In one scene we see a woman collect a letter from the language center, open it and begin reading it as she walks down the stairs. This is how the film opens. She drops these letters and the pages scatter around the stairwell. She collects them—all apart from one which we see still remaining on the stair as she leaves—and puts them together in some random order. This randomly ordered set of pages of his letter then is what then describes the order of events that takes place in the film. She reads one page, and we see those events, and then the next page, and those events. But there is another layer to the film, because as the film unfolds, as we see this woman reading the letters and the scenes the letters describe, we also hear at certain points the voice of a man narrating the events taking place, making some comments: 'wimp'; and in the penultimate scene: 'and the next morning we left together for Japan, we have two children..' So, there are basically three interwoven perspectives, in addition to the randomly interwoven narratives above. This is the basic structure of the film.

This film is about involving us in an experience of the alternate version of time Mori speaks about above. For while its true that its possible to deconstruct the film and to reconstruct the distinct narratives involved, while this does give guidance on elaborating an eventual understanding of the film, this really doesn't capture the essence of the film. To really make sense of it, it's necessary to think about how a 'time of necessity' and a 'time of distraction' are related. This 'time of necessity' could be seen as the feeling we have of the temporality of things that are deeply meaningful and personal to us—the long-duration time of development of our character or personality, of our career, perhaps, or of our intimate relationships. These things matter most and they put the other things that happen in our life into context. If we are expecting to meet a good friend and, on the way to meet that person, we have a conversation with a co-worker who distracts us, then this distraction has the effect of creating a kind of bubble in time: depending on how long it lasts and how much it demands of us, we could become lodged in this bubble for some time before being able to continue on our way to our other, more important meeting. And its from within this bubble, within this alternative 'time of distraction', then, that a perspective on the proper ordering of time emerges: from within the bubble it seems that, on the one hand time continues, that the clock on the wall keeps ticking and that we move forward. But, really, we are falling behind, getting out of order as the most important sequence of events is being missed or delayed, that of our 'time of necessity'. And even then, when the distraction ends and we return to our primary time-line, we have a sense of being behind, then, rather than ahead, of having been delayed.

And, perhaps, once time has been ruptured in this way so many times, it becomes an endlessly complex interwoven assemblage of the various temporalities that we've been forced to deal with, none of which has a perfect or dominant position any longer, but within which the proper hierarchy still remains sensible and continues to provide order: like an image of a time that should have been through which we observe the time that actually is and has been. Despite that we know what the 'real time' is, we can never simply will ourselves into it; rather we, especially now in this modern age of information and communication technologies, of globalisation, of liberalism and the primacy of the individual, are constantly forced to navigate this kind of complex sea of temporalities in daily life.

This is the most basic way in which the film should be understood: he is there to meet a woman he loves, he is distracted by an alternate time-line while he waits, and thus, his experience during this time is not that of a simple time, but of a complex time, a multiple time.

But the film is yet more complex even than this. Consider the use of English in the film and the way in which different cultures and languages are used in it. Speaking with people from other countries in a non-native language usually takes on the feeling of being somehow provisional: the use of English to bridge a communication barrier has the function of erecting some basic level of understanding within which everyone present can be comfortable, can reside, at least for a time. In many of these situations it seems that the creation of this alternate English-speaking-reality takes on a necessity of its own (that there are particular topics one draws on, particular ways of speaking, of being reticent about one's speech and of trying highlight what's being left out with which one can predictably fill these multicultural, transnational, trans-lingual spaces). So, when Mori talks about not wanting to speak about 'Koreans in general' and that the Guesthouse Woman 'doesn't know any Japanese people, sorry' he's talking from within this kind of context and, really, talking in response to it, as an attempt to puncture through it to something more authentic.

However, at this level, it seems natural to think, then, that the point of the film is that that English speaking reality, this temporary and provisional trans-global space is only just a temporal bubble within which Mori resides before returning to his dominant, authentic time: that the English-speaking in the film is just a part of this inauthentic provisional time he endures while he is traveling in Japan. But, as revealed at the conclusion of the film, the reality is that Mori is married to this woman and they have two children and are living in Japan. So, is it, then, just the typical 'happy ending', the provisional time of searching for the soul-mate ends and he resumes with real life? The fact that the voice-over, which is the third-level of perspective of time in the structure of the film, continues to speak in English and to reflect on this past moment has the effect of extending the bubble all the way to the limits of the known time within the film and, more importantly, into one's own life as spectator as well: one senses the entrapment of the narrator within this multiplicity of temporalities. Rather than having escaped, Mori simply occupies a different position within this assemblage: that of reflecting back on the past from within his present moment of continued lack of release into an open, unstructured time.

And so it is that, through this film and through this reflection that mirrors the way in which real times are folded into one another that we come to appreciate the very real and very basic structure of multiple time that particularly defines our modern times.