Best Films of 2017: ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE
dir. Hong Sang-soo
The static camera and static stagings aren’t sly or intimate enough for a fly-on-the-wall feel. Conspicuous zooms puncture the still space like jagged incisions. Hong Sang-soo’s camera announces itself as if he were your uncle behind the camcorder of a home movie. The level of detachment in this seemingly unmannered technique lends each moment the frigidity of being something less than a scene but, at the same time, stamps it with the assurance of being irrefutably nothing other.
These are actors in front of the camera. There is a person behind the camera. The actress in front of the camera, Kim Minhee, plays an actress very much like herself. The actress talks about a director she had an affair with, very much like Hong, whom Kim had an affair with and whom we know is behind the camera.
The film and those making the film are reflections of each other housed within a shared cinematic space, where the fourth wall acts as a flimsy, porous divider between the two. There is no discourse between those on film and those filming, but the intercourse is palpable, charging the space they share with the electric tension of self-flagellation and catharsis.
The bare contrivance of this arrangement doesn’t allow the viewer the typical distance of a voyeur but instead makes him or her complicit to the spectacle. When the soju starts flowing and resentments spew forth in uninhibited outbursts and accusations, the embarrassment is ours just as much as it is any of the dinner guests’ onscreen.
On the Beach at Night Alone wields intimacy’s double-edge. When strolling through the park, the movie can feel like cozy companionship; at other times, it can feel cuttingly vulnerable.
Critics Pick- 4.25/5
Best Films of 2017
Paddington 2
Call Me by Your Name
On Body and Soul
Slack Bay
Phantom Thread
