Another year, another new film by Hong Sang-soo.
The Cinema Guild has released an official US trailer for Hong Sang-soo’s “Yourself and Yours,” which first premiered at the Toronto & San Sebastian Film Festivals in 2016. This is the third Hong Sang-soo film being released this year along with “Hill of Freedom” and “The Woman Who Ran.” The man is a cinematic beast.
The story follows Korean couple Youngsoo and Minjung, after the latter is seen with another man, an argument happens which leads to Youngsoo breaking up with her. The next day, filled with regret, he goes out looking for her only to spot women who look just like here. The film has been described as a "comic mystery" and "delightfully drunken riff on Abbas Kiarostami".
Starring Ju-hyuk Kim, Yoo-Young Lee, Kwon Haehyo, Yu Junsang, and Kim Euisung, “Yourself and Yours” will finally be released on VOD June 5th.
If I counted correctly, Hong Sang-soo has released 8 movies in the last 4 years (take that, Takashi Miike!) The best one of those is 2016’s “Right Now, Wrong Then,” which won the prestigious Golden Leopard at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival. I wrote about the film back in 2016:
“A film director mistakenly arrives in town a day early to attend a screening of one of his films. With time to kill, he strikes up a conversation with an aspiring painter who he meets in a temple and they spend the rest of the day together. Although he finds her attractive, she is considerably younger than he is and neither of them is particularly outgoing. Director Hong Sang-Soo splits his film into two different versions of what happens over the next 24 hours, but unlike those two films, the outcome depends not so much on chance, but on how the main character chooses to behave. There are subtle variations in how events unfold causing the male protagonist to fall flat on his face in the first telling (‘wrong then’) but coming to a more fulfilling culmination in the second sequence (‘right now’). He’s a cad, but the second time around turns out to be a lovable one. Although slightly similar in plot to ‘Sliding Doors,” this is a far better movie than the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring drama. Why? Because Hong isn’t interested in the trivial or grandiose, and would rather focus on the smaller details that define conversation.”