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When we moved to Seoul, my girlfriend and I, not unstrategically, chose an apartment located near several major universities. This guaranteed a robust level of cultural amenity; imagine, if you will, the features of several American \u201ccollege towns\u201d all stacked up within a few square miles. One morning after getting settled in, we took a walk up toward the Film Forum, a kind of miniature art-house multiplex right across the street from Ewha Womans University. There we caught a screening of what, for me, made for the ideal first movie with which to begin my life in Korea: Hong Sangsoo\u2019s Right Now, Wrong Then<\/em> (\uc9c0\uae08\uc740 \ub9de\uace0 \uadf8\ub54c\ub294 \ud2c0\ub9ac\ub2e4).<\/p>\n
Koreans often ask me what got me interested in their country, a question that inevitably leads to Hong Sangsoo. Nothing has motivated me to immerse myself in things Korean as much as the language itself (about which more another day), but my first exposure to the language came through the movies. I got that exposure when Korean cinema enjoyed its first international boom in the early 2000s, which flung out into the world such slick but thematically and tonally distinctive pictures as Park Chan-wook\u2019sJoint Security Area<\/em> (\uacf5\ub3d9\uacbd\ube44\uad6c\uc5ed) and Oldboy <\/em>(\uc62c\ub4dc\ubcf4\uc774), Bong Joon-ho\u2019s Memories of Murder <\/em>(\uc0b4\uc778\uc758 \ucd94\uc5b5) and The Host<\/em> (\uad34\ubb3c), and Kim Ki-duk\u2019s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter\u2026 and Spring <\/em>(\ubd04 \uc5ec\ub984 \uac00\uc744 \uaca8\uc6b8 \uadf8\ub9ac\uace0 \ubd04) and 3-Iron<\/em> (\ube48 \uc9d1).<\/p>\n
Having watched through the filmographies of those Korean auteurs, I found my way to Hong, perhaps the auteur-iest of all Korean auteurs. By that I don\u2019t mean to call him the absolute best filmmaker of the bunch (though I do follow his work with by far the most enthusiasm), but the one who \u2014 having made a movie a year for almost the past two decades now, each on a shoestring budget and some with scripts written shooting day by shooting day \u2014 has arrived at the most developed style, one he uses to examine, with clear eyes from many different angles, the stories that unfold when a certain type of man (often an filmmaker or academic) and a certain type of woman (often an artist) collide in modern Korea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n