“The Day After”– Movie Review

This weekend, I attended the opening night screening of the new Korean drama “The Day After”, directed by Hong Sang-soo. 

Synopsis

When a married man ends an affair with an employee, will he repeat his behavior with her replacement?

Story

Bongwan (Kwon Hae-hyo) runs a book publishing company and is frequently racing to the office unusually early in the morning.  Quite reasonably, his wife suspects something is up.  She confronts him about this and speculates that he is having an affair with another woman – possibly, someone at work.  Bongwan refuses to allay her concerns, but neither does he deny nor confirm her accusations.  Instead, Bongwan is more concerned with the office assistant who quit her job about a month ago.  Her replacement is scheduled to start that day. 

Areum (Kim Min-hee) is greeted by Bongwan on her first day at work.  She came highly recommended by a long-time acquaintance of Bongwan, so he hired her immediately.  Areum starts her new career at the publisher with an extended conversation with Bongwan over a cup of coffee.  Areum, as it turns out, aspires to be a writer someday and thinks that working for a publisher will help her toward that goal.  She looks up to Bongwan because he is renowned throughout the country as himself being a great writer and literary critic.

Bongwan’s wife finds a poem she suspects he wrote to his girlfriend and ventures to the publishing office to confront her husband’s lover – unfortunately, she finds Areum there and wrongly believes this young woman of being her husband’s girlfriend.  She begins beating up poor Areum, who is rightly confused by all of this; Bongwan’s wife doesn’t believe Areum when she denies the accusation.  Once Bongwan discovers this, he explains to his wife he’s not having an affair with her – but actually, he was cheating on his wife with his previous assistant.  Will Areum now be able to keep her new job or will Bongwan be forced to fire her in order to mollify his wife?

Review

“The Day After” is an intricate and complex movie that presents far too many challenges to viewers to make it accessible.  Also, its fluidity with time can present difficulties in terms of your ability to follow the story.  There are probably people who strongly believe that this is a clever way to tell a tale.  They’re not entirely wrong – in some ways it is.  The problem is that spending an hour and a half watching two people chatting incessantly over coffee or during a lunch or dinner at a restaurant can wear you down a bit.  It is a less interesting version of “My Dinner With Andre”.

Where the movie goes wrong is in its lack of dramatic tension and absence of a protagonist in whom the audience can invest its interest.  Without either one of those things, you really don’t have much of a story to tell.  Apparently, we are supposed to get behind the man here but he seems to be such a scoundrel you don’t want to bother.  As far as the wife is concerned, her character doesn’t have enough screen time to be a protagonist; likewise for the ex-girlfriend.  The new office employee, on the other hand, has plenty of screen time with her boss and given how unfairly she’s treated, you want to make her the heroine; the only problem is she allows herself to be a victim in this situation and never actually does anything remotely “heroic”. 

Lacking any way to connect to these characters – or a compelling story in which the audience can get involved – there’s precious little that makes this movie worthy of recommending.  It seems as though this is supposed to be an intense psychological drama, but it doesn’t come across that way at all; instead, it spends time appearing to chase its own tail in search of a plot.  Why was the film shot in black and white?  It’s hard to say.  Director Hong Sang-soo claims that it was his own idea and not that of his cinematographer.  Perhaps the choice was to make this story feel as though it could have taken place in an earlier time (the books he publishes are all in hard copies – if there are digitized versions, there is no mention made of them).