You are the one

Writing about it from the New York Film Festival last year, I des­paired of Hong Sang-soo’s hil­ari­ous ode to expat sexu­al frus­tra­tion Night and Day ever see­ing “any kind of mean­ing­ful U.S. release.” And while this may only be mean­ing­ful to res­id­ents of what we nat­ives call the tri-state area, the good news is that the pic­ture begins a week-long run at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archive today. 

This is part of what I said about the pic­ture at The Auteurs’ (the full notice is here): 

Given its very expli­cit sex talk and the ser­i­ous emo­tion­al dys­func­tion of nearly all its characters—and, yes, its gen­er­ous length—Night and Day some­times plays like a Korean take on Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore. Only minus the lost ideal­ism, and filtered through some vin­tage Woody Allen.  For this is, in fact, one of Hong’s most laugh-out-loud hil­ari­ous films, largely on account of the hap­less [prot­ag­on­ist] Kim, who seems con­sti­tu­tion­ally incap­able of doing or say­ing the right thing at any giv­en time. “I like the image…but not the title,” he dopily muses, stand­ing in front of Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde” on a vis­it to the Musee d’Orsay. The char­ac­ter is a dis­con­cert­ingly hon­est por­trait of male sexu­al desire at its most abjectly fum­bling, and Hong’s film is is one of the most acute depic­tions of how male sexu­al desire often gets its way, for all that. Unlike long­time Hong cham­pi­on Manohla Dargis, who lamen­ted in the Times that this pic­ture is “bloated,” I believe Hong needs to draw things out here so as to make his theme really register. So many times watch­ing this I thought, “This is what people mean when they talk about ‘pain­fully funny’.”

So if you’re around and have a few hours to spare, check it out. Bet you’ll think much bet­ter of your own love life afterwards.