Yourself and Yours

Description

A man walks into a bar and notices a pretty young woman. Her name is Minjung (Lee You-young); he’s thinks he knows her; she swears they’ve never met. They flirt and she admits that she has an identical twin sister— they’re always being mistaken for each other, she claims. She and the man begin a relationship. Meanwhile, a painter (Kim Joo-hyuck) keeps hearing that his semi-alcoholic girlfriend has reverted back to her old drinking ways, which throws him into a rage spiral. She denies everything and leaves him—and it turns out her name is also Minjung, and she’s a dead ringer for the earlier woman. Is she lying? Is she forgetting as a result of her blackout-level inebriation? Is the coquettish female we first met Minjung’s twin or a doppelganger? Prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (Right Now, Wrong Then, Festival 2016) returns with an absurdist variation on his usual battle-of-the-sexes farce, complete with mistaken identities, deadpan humor, conversational jousting, and copious levels of drinking. Taking a page out of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire playbook, he drops in a surreal element of having the marvelous Lee You-young play the elusive (or multiple) Minjung, along with his usual dissection of relationships and what we project onto them. It’s another gem from one of modern cinema’s slyest social critics—taking on men who “fool around like kids or pounce like wolves” and the women who wearily tolerate them. —David Fear

Film Details