Hong Sang-Soo’s Woman on the Beach (Haebyonui yoin) is a beautifully crafted, minutely observed gem of a film, and I’m at a loss for words, even after a second viewing, to tell you what it’s about. I can tell you that it’s refreshing to see a film about relationships that isn’t an unreal romantic comedy or a lacerating Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? deathmatch.
I can tell you about Woman on the Beach‘s perfect cinematic architecture: a triangle, turning into a dyad, then to another pairing that’s a cracked reflection of the one that came before, then to another triangle, and finally, the image of the heroine driving off into the horizon. There’s a wonderful visual symmetry and repetition at work in Hong’s film, from one character’s encounter with three trees to another’s nighttime plunge into the thick woods, to the similar pa jun and soju meals (and there are unbelievable quantities of the latter consumed) that are eaten at crucial junctures in the narrative.
Not much happens in Hong’s film, but the small shifts in the relationship dynamics (and the narrative focal point, for that matter) are crucial, if slow, in the context of the movie: a director (Joongrae), a production designer (Changwook) and the production designer’s mistress (Moonsook, played by the utterly lovely Ko Hyun-jeong) go to the beach for the weekend and work on a screenplay. She’s a composer and a fan of the director’s work (he’s constantly called “Director Kim” throughout the film), the screenwriter’s actually married, and the relationships between them aren’t exactly as they seem.
Early in the film, Joongrae tells the married Changwook that he admires the latter’s courage — and trust in the director’s discretion — to bring his girlfriend along for the weekend. (It’s not immediately clear whether Joongrae — played by an excellent Seung-woo Kim — is saying this in a “Damn, dawg!” male-solidarity sort of way, or deliberately trying to elicit more information, and it’s this constant ambiguity of intention, in all of the characters, that underlies the narrative.)
“By the way, he’s not my boyfriend,” Moonsook adds.
“Come on! Do we have to have sex to be boyfriend and girlfriend?” asks Changwook, surprised.
“Of course there has to be sex,” says Moonsook, then turns to Joongrae and asks, “Don’t you agree, Director Kim?” (Joongrae laughs and says, “I love this,” and so do we.)
“We’re just friends, you and I,” she continues calmly, addressing Changwook.
“Do friends kiss?” asks the screenwriter, aghast.
“We kissed once,” she reminds him, annoyed. “Big deal.”
It’s both painful and funny and truthful and shot through with ambiguity all at the same time, and Hong lets all this unspool with a careful patience. (His camera framing is absolutely precise; you can almost tell, depending on the words spoken, when the camera will zoom in to isolate two people in the frame and shut out the third.) There’s no real contest in this triangle, though; Director Kim, who is (seemingly) more intelligent and more charming than Changwook, starts asking more probing and seriously disarming questions, and manages to steal Moonsook away.
He turns out, in any case, to be something of a cad and a serial philanderer, as we see him two days later, prowling the same seaside town, ostensibly looking for a woman to interview for a casting project. He picks out Sunhee, a divorcee vacationing at the beach, because she reminds him of a character he’s working on. But we are told, at least according to one of the restaurant owners, that Sunhee resembles Moonsook (though not really). We can’t tell what this means for sure: is this the director’s usual casting-couch method, or has he, in fact, been pierced, Jimmy Stewart-style, by Moonsook’s absence, and therefore doomed to obsessive repetition?) And all goes well until… Moonsook returns, for reasons which are, again, not entirely clear.
It’s this flirtatious resistance to explanation, the refusal to pin down the characters’ motives, and the way words hang expectantly in the air, that makes for fascinating viewing. (In fact this sense of in-betweenness is also reflected in the setting: indeed, we hardly ever see the ocean in all of the actual scenes on the beach — just people gingerly skirting the edges — and the weather is this constant cloudy gray, like San Francisco’s Ocean Beach in the summer.)
If there’s anything the movie is “about” thematically, it’s probably about the temporary nature of love and solace, male helplessness and immaturity, and (this is explicitly voiced in the film) female choice. But there’s a particularly illustrative scene, which for me sums up the film better: in a subtly comical scene on the beach, when one of the couples kiss for the first time, Moonsook has time to break away from his embrace and put her hand to her forehead in embarrassment.
Woman on the Beach is also about sudden vulnerabilities, calculated confidences, occasional silences, white lies and how they work (or not), moments of discomfort, awkward pauses, or the small, cutting things people say unconsciously (or not), the ways in which people sit or stand, or look at each other, the moment when one touches the other, accidentally or purposefully, or brushes the other’s sleeve meaningfully (or not), how people are often accurate or inaccurate readers of character, of stolen embraces in stolen rooms. The gestures of the mating ritual are imbued here, in one of my favorite films of the year, with a heightened, shimmering significance.
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