A synopsis of the film from the SFIAAFF website:
In the world of film director Ku Gyun-nam, the “hero” of Hong Sang-soo’s latest dissection of the modern-day man-boy, misery doesn’t just love company: it spreads it around like rats with the black plague. “Famous in East Asia,” the arthouse filmmaker Ku (Kim Tae-woo) still finds it hard to maintain respect. When he goes to a film festival (the real-life Jecheon International Music and Film Festival) as a judge, Ku drinks and fibs his way through several awkward encounters with various erratic, volatile characters, including the festival’s quick-tongued hospitality coordinator, who’s more hostile than hospitable.
Throughout, we find Ku is the kind of person who is instinctively unhappy at a friend’s success, covets other people’s wives, and is willing to say anything for a little attention. Later, he heads south to Jeju Island, where rather than learn from any mistakes, he blithely repeats them. When Ku reunites with an old (now married) lover, complications of the heart are paired with far more primitive (and drunken) impulses, and Ku begins to burn bridges with unprecedented efficiency. With his quick and deliberate pans and zooms, Hong’s camera seems to have a curiosity of its own, providing the viewer an alternative perspective to the triviality of human foibles. As is expected from the master of awkward, Hong meticulously knits a tapestry of uncomfortable human interactions, central to it the evolution (or lack thereof) of the thinking, drinking man.
This one should be a good one among the many that’s featured. Maybe I’ll see you there?
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