Right Now, Wrong Then

Description

A middle-aged artist, a young ingénue, existential crises, romantic fumblings and confessional drinkathons—like Monet and his water lilies, Hong Sang-soo keeps returning to the same basic material and refining his pitch-perfect preoccupations of what fools lovelorn men are. And as with several of the South Korean filmmaker’s recent works, his latest character study revolves around a single situation being reprised with very different results. Famous director Ham (Jung Jae-young), travels from Seoul to present one of his movies at a festival. Desperate to kill time, he visits a local Buddhist monastery and meets Hee-jung (Kim Min-hee), a beautiful painter who’s never heard of him. They spend the rest of the afternoon talking about life,and art; once the drinks switch from tea to copious beers with Hee-jung’s friends, however, secrets are spilled and love connections cut short. Then, out of nowhere, the reset button is pushed and Right Now, Wrong Then is right back at the beginning—but with subtle differences—in a film that confirms that the creator of this moral tale remains a thoroughly contemporary heir to French New Wave director Eric Rohmer’s offbeat romantic cinema. —David Fear

Film Details