[CRITICAL] YOURSELF AND YOURS

The very active Hong Hang-soo continues its explorations of poetic

and fantastic for the feeling of love with this curious YOURSELF AND YOURS, fable tasty that does not have all the answers.

The Hong Sang-soo’s new is here ! To strength to offer a movie every year, it would almost be disappointed not to see emerge a new cru in the Korean film-maker. And while it is now easy to reduce his world in a high standard, with its codes and its themes – the cinema, the love, the bars, the alcohol and the variations -, we cannot deny that her writing, if she ever existed, the remains of a crazy simplicity. In fact, Hong Sang-soo is a skillful magician who freezes, by its false redundancies, the reflections typical of the love felt between two people and gives his staging a hard-hitting deception. His ideas of narrative arriving at the day-to-day, lying on the corners of tables before sitting down on the set, through still each film a haunting fantasy. This latest feature, in date, is a nice door into this appalling filmography and delight certainly aficionados.

Very rightly pointed by Antoine (see critique of One day with, one day without), we may store without difficulty each of the works of the filmmaker in a successful television series, dealing with bold romantic relationships and their infinitesimal oscillations. Thus, when Youngsoo learns that his girlfriend Minjung has a drink with a man, the couple collapses. In a dreadful sentence, literally hurt, Youngsoo does what he can to find Minjung, while at the same time, she – or her twin sister or a look-alike – up the bars to meet new suitors who perform them. Here, Hong Sang-soo is not going to replay his scenes, which also remain very mechanical – plans sequence of fixed, zoom in/out, interlude music, it will call the multiplication of its female character, Minjung. And the misunderstanding is inviting you into YOURSELF AND YOURS.

“YOURSELF AND YOURS is as romantic and funny as sensorially hypnotic. “Click to tweet

Object of the strange, YOURSELF AND YOURS reminds us, once again, the uniqueness of the setting in scene of Hong Sang-soo. This game of false pretences is constantly interrogator, where it is impossible to distinguish with ease the real from the fake. Where fled Minjung ? Who are these women whose silhouettes are also familiar ? Is this really the Minjung ? Feint-it amnesia ? So many riddles that it would be futile to try to lighten and even which could dig the head indefinitely. For Hong Sang-soo, the answers are elsewhere. They are without a doubt in the superb daily life, in a joyful ride over water, or in the innocent way of dealing with small questions of sentimental around a refreshing beer.

As romantic and funny as sensorially hypnotic, YOURSELF AND YOURS looks more like a sort of monster hybrid between Woody Allen and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Hong Sang-soo is not, itself, may not be an aesthete to the Na Hong-jin, another figure emblematic of the land of the morning calm, but he remains a great poet. In YOURSELF AND YOURS, we are ready with joy to the game of seven errors, which ends, here, in an emotional “happy ending”, a luminous candor. As if love, in spite of the tumults, sickly as she is known, is in the end just a wonderful new beginning.

Sofiane

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