Like Woody Allen, Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo explores the same material in film after film. Some audiences might find it tiring, but in his hands it’s a mode of artistic refinement akin to the old masters’ approach to painting, where each nuance and wrinkle is studiously deployed for its effect on the whole. In Right Now, Wrong Then, Sangsoo uses a canny structural gimmick to force the audience to focus even more closely on the minutia of a chance encounter, restoring a sense of wonder to the endless permutations of possibility that unfold each time two people bare themselves to each other.
In this case, the two people are Ham Chunsu (Jung Jaeyoung) and Yoon Heejung (Kim Minhee). Chunsu is a middle-aged film director in Suwon for a festival screening of his film, but has arrived a day early by accident. Killing time, he goes to a local temple where he meets Heejung, a young painter, albeit one without the confidence to identify as such. They strike up a conversation, which continues from the temple, to a coffeehouse, to her studio, to a sushi restaurant, to a small gathering of friends, before it ends in the abandoned night streets of Suwon in front of her house. Their day ends about halfway through the film, before Sangsoo takes us back to the beginning, where their encounter unfolds again, with the same broad strokes but an assortment of ever-so-slight differences. These differences include subtle shifts in framing, comments interpreted differently or facts about the characters coming to light in a different context. The result is illuminating, the close focus reveals how infinitesimally small twists of fate color our lives (or films) with different tones; it’s like taking a microscope to the mystery of human chemistry.
The canvas on which Sangsoo conducts this experiment is familiar but lovingly rendered. Ham and Yoon are in very different places in life, but both are lonely and vulnerable, open to an unexpected change. This is true despite the fact that Ham’s charm hides suspect motives – he’s married and transparently trading on his celebrity - giving the audience the distance not to root for the fulfillment of the obvious. But even if their connection is ephemeral, both characters are enriched through the day’s events.
In the context of more formulaic films, where a happy relationship is preordained, it’s incredibly refreshing to see a meeting where the reaching of an understanding is not a formality to be rushed through, but the hesitant, emotionally fraught undertaking that it is in real life. Paradoxically, the version of the events where more goes “right” ends unhappily, whereas the version where more goes “wrong,” sometimes hilariously so, gives the characters a deeper and more intimate connection.
