Hong Sang-Soo's Hahaha and Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry
A few brief thoughts about two great recent Korean films: Hong's Hahaha reflects his increasing formal mastery, and it's also one of his funniest films. The film is told in complexly interlocking flashbacks told by two narrators who are presented only in black-and-white still photos. Each of their recollections is set off by the sound and the still image of the men toasting each other during a long drinking session.
Lee's Poetry, which I just saw for the second time, has a haunting concluding sequence which draws great emotional force from revisiting locations seen earlier in the film, but now highlighting the absence of some or all of the major characters. This is a motif which runs through some of my favorite films of all time: Antonioni's L'Eclisse, of course, but also Resnais's Muriel (playing this weekend at Museum of the Moving Image) and Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. I don't know whether Lee was influenced by Antonioni's film in this sequence, but he starts with the structural absence of L'Eclisse's famous conclusion and subtly reverses it by introducing the dead girl, absent throughout the film but suddenly given life through the poetry of the main character.
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