On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)

Directed by Hong Sang-soo

Women in Space and Time Part 1/3

(My) Dream

When I’m down, which is a lot lately, I find myself looking at the program of my fair city’s film museum to see whether they run any interesting retrospectives. In January (the worst of months) they ran a Joanna Hogg retrospective (which is an essay in and of itself), as well as one on the South Korean director and auteur Hong Sang-soo. To my great shame, he didn’t ring a bell. Thankfully shame is my greatest motivator, so I immediately bought a ticket to the 2017 movie On the Beach at Night Alone starring Kim Min-hee (a mouthful of a title which I since then managed to merely get right two times on the first try).

In 2015, Hong Sang-soo, who was married at the time, and Kim Min-hee made their relationship public and were eviscerated by the Korean press, which ended Min-hee’s career. She’s been exclusively acting and otherwise working on Sang-soo’s movies ever since. Their collaborative body of work since they were dubbed “Korea’s adulterous couple” has been a meditation on uncomfortable romantic encounters, relationships in the movie industry and the overall pain of being a romantic sexual being in a rigid society.

Part One: In Waiting

Young-hee (Kim Min-hee), a washed-up actress, goes to Hamburg to visit her friend Jee-young (Seo Young-hwa) and to recover from an affair with a married director (Moon Sung-Keun) and the subsequent media scandal that wiped out her career. She is still very much in love with the man, which makes it hard to deal with both the break-up and the societal repercussions at once.

Young-hee’s visit to Hamburg consists of a somewhat ritualistic daily route from Jee-young’s apartment to a sausage stand to a park and back. We first meet them at the sausage stand, with Young-hee praising the filling nature of German food, before they depart to the park. At the park, they’re verbally accosted by a black-clad stranger, who asks for the time and, when they don’t immediately answer, leaves in a huff. The man ends up stalking them in the park. Sitting on a bench in the park they talk about Young-hee’s realtionship to the director, and we get glimpses of her desperately wishing for something else, the freedom to be whereever and whoever she wants. A freedom that Korea can’t afford her. Multiple times she expresses her desire to stay in Hamburg and live with her friend, by which she’s unceremoniously rejected.

For now, however, she is in an endless state of tortured waiting, as shown in the endless repetition of their routine, the never-ending interrogations of whether she or her friend are hungry and the constant question, whether the director will visit her in Hamburg. Throughout the entirety of Part One, time is irrelevant, capitulating before Young-hee’s overwhelming desire to see her ex-lover. And so, she and her friend become tragicomic figures, not unlike Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

The similarities to the play, and specifically its stale stillness, become apparent after their first exchange with the stalker in the park. Before crossing a small river, Young-hee starts praying, which denotes a somewhat spiritual motif. After crossing the bridge, the women find themselves pursued by the man in black and hurriedly leave the park. While wandering the streets, Young-hee and Jee-young observe several strange people, without meaningfully interacting with them, just passing the time until He finally arrives. The director, like Godot, sends Young-hee an e-mail and promises to come this Saturday (coincidentally Godot also promised to arrive on Saturday in the play), but with no clear sense of time, there is no understanding, when this Saturday will arrive or whether it’s long passed. Their sense of time is further eroded by the constant twilight and gloomy winter days, which all look the same after a while, giving the movie overall an out-of-time feel.

The dialogue between the two women is warm, but always subtly adversarial, and nowhere is it more apparent than in their ample talk of food (again very similar to Vladimir and Estragon’s dynamic). Korean society and the film industry are always present in the background of every conversation and every longing look. So much so that it feels like a character of its own. Young-hee wants to be free of it, feeling its tight leash every time she talks about her relationship.

It is Korean custom to ask whether one’s eaten as a common greeting, with most people expecting a “yes” in return; a simple transaction of “how are you?” and “I’m fine”. Here, however, the questioning becomes an intense interrogation of belonging, as Jee-young, a lonely introverted woman, always rejects food of any kind, regardless of whether she’s eaten, and Young-hee, on the other hand, never says no when offered food. Therefore, Jee-young conforms to the colloquial standard, regardless of her well-being, while Young-hee, someone in the process of being shunned by Korean society, does not.

In the Part One finale Young-hee is at the beach at night (just as the title promised), drawing a portrait of her director in the sand. While preparing to go home, she stares at the water, contemplating her desire to see him again. Before she can go home with Jee-young, however, she’s knocked unconscious by the stalker from the park and carried away into Part Two. At this point she is everyone and no-one. By virtue of her being an actress, she embodies a little bit of everyone in Waiting for Godot and their constant struggle with an eternity of waiting and repetition.

In their final scene together, Jee-young marvels at the portrait’s good looks, which introduces us the leitmotif of Part Two.

Part Two: The Law of Attraction

Time starts up again, as we see Young-hee blankly staring at the screen in an empty cinema, looking as if she just saw Part One (I also looked like that, after that ending). Outside she meets Chun-woo (Kwon Hae-hyo), an old acquaintance from the industry, which is the first, but certainly not the last person from her old life she accidentally meets. She tells him that she came back to Korea a while back and, as she always wanted to see the winter sea, is visiting their mutual friend Jun-hee (Song Seon-mi) in Gangneung, a coastal city in the east of the country. He then invites her for coffee to a café he and Myung-soo (Jung Jae-yong), another mutual from the industry, opened together, which turns out to be the café she and Jun-hee were planning to meet at all along.

Right from the beginning, Chun-woo comments on Young-hee’s looks. He says how much she’s matured since they last saw each other (presumably before she went to Hamburg), and that it suits her. In turn, Young-hee admires his youthful looks. These comments about age and looks permeate every conversation in Part Two. In the evening they all end up together drinking at a dinner party. In a drunken haze, Jun-hee remarks on how attractive Young-hee has become. The word is specifically being used, as she does seem to coincidentally attract people from her past a lot.

And then they kiss. …No, really!

During the dinner party, we get the first of two drunken outbursts from Young-hee, who is mostly quiet and easily steamrolled when she’s sober. Unlike in Hamburg, where she was able to speak her truth in relative peace, here she has to rely on alcohol to give weight to her emotions. In her “in-vino-veritas” moment, she talks about how no-one is entitled to love, which quickly changes to the notion that no-one has the right to love, showing that she’s is still hurting from the break-up and the additional burden of her failed career. The scene is also highly cringe, watch at your own risk.

Although everyone assures her how beautiful and talented she is, she knows that getting back into the business will be nearly impossible. With Seoul looming in the distance, she wonders whether she could just stay in Gangneung, echoing her thoughts that she expressed in Hamburg, but now with less conviction. It is as though being home takes away her fluidity, making her more concrete. Time, it seems, as intangible as it was in Part One, started moving with an unparalleled violence, reminding Young-hee that, especially for an actress, it is both an asset and a threat. It is her personal stalker, calling the shots and following her everywhere she goes.

We meet the man in black from Part One once more, as she checks into a sea-side hotel, but now she doesn’t notice him as he stands outside her windows overlooking the eternal winter sea.

By the way, I have no idea, what he represents. Time? Death? All of the above? Who knows…..

After a light lunch drinking session (there’s a lot of drinking in this movie) in the hotel with Chun-woo and Jun-hee and them assuring her that everything will be fine, they depart for the night, as Young-hee goes for a walk on the beach. In a familiar scene, she draws a portrait of the director in the sand, while looking at the swaying body of water in front of her, before lying down and falling asleep. Not long after, she gets startled out of her nap by her director’s assistant, who happens to be scouting locations for his next movie at that exact beach. Young-hee’s law of attraction working wonders again, she gets invited to dinner with the director and his crew.

During dinner, with ample amounts of alcohol already consumed, the movie gears up for its final confrontation. A confrontation, I imagine, a lot of people dream of, after an especially messy break-up. The director Sang-won, who remarkably resembles Sang-soo, talks about the movie that he’s about to make. It doesn’t have a script, as he wants to go with the flow and see where every scene takes him. The only thing he knows is that it’s supposed to be about someone he loves and him reckoning with his anger, regret and love towards this person. The fact that he’s still allowed to make movies, while Young-hee is pretty much stranded, doesn’t escape anyone’s attention.

After hearing this, Young-hee flies into a righteous, alcohol-fueled rage, saying everything that everyone everywhere always wanted to say to an ex. She scolds him for having (dumb) regrets, making him cry in the process (very satisfying, would recommend). With tears in his eyes, he reads her a passage from a book that strangely sounds like their own first romantic encounter, and after shouting some more, gives her the book, as a symbol of closure of their doomed romance.

That awkward moment, when your boss dukes it out with his ex and breaks down sobbing at your company dinner.

She wakes up at the beach, the drawing on the sand gone and someone else trying to wake her off-screen. After a last glance at the sea, she turns and walks.

On the Beach at Night Alone

by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

 … but wait. As much as I agree with Whitman that everything is similar under the eternal gaze of the sea and the stars and the clef of the universe and as much as this movie is a perfect cinematic representation of the poem, I’d like to propose another ending.

We don’t know, where Young-hee is going, we don’t know, what freedom this oneiric closure afforded her, so I’d like to say to her…

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

by Kim Adonizzio

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever

closed your legs to someone you loved opened

them for someone you didn’t moved against

a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach

seaweed clinging to your ankles paid

good money for a bad haircut backed away

from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled

into the back seat for lack of a tampon

if you swam across a river under rain sang

using a dildo for a microphone stayed up

to watch the moon eat the sun entire

ripped out the stitches in your heart

because why not if you think nothing &

no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

… and wish her all the best. She certainly deserves it.