Mar 29, 2012
SFFILM
The Day He Arrives (Book chon bang hyang, South Korea 2011), a self-effacing, inward-looking comedy written and directed by the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, opens an exclusive San Francisco premiere engagement May 4 at SF Film Society Cinema (1746 Post Street).
High Modernist master of contemporary South Korean cinema Hong Sang-soo returns, and then returns again, to his cherished tableaux of endlessly looped and ever loopier time travels in his latest tale of Seoul and its sad sack cineastes. A black-and-white variation on Hong’s now-trademark twice-told tales about increasingly drunken filmmakers (this time incarnated by actor Yu Jun-sang) embarking on doomed journeys to reunite with mistreated old flames, the movie is both a comedy of errors (men rarely look more foolish than under Hong’s withering eye) and a nightmare vision of a tormented creator ten times darker than Barton Fink. For long-standing Hong fans, many of The Day He Arrives‘s eccentric and occasionally surrealist mannerisms may seem all but folkloric: characters who double one another or scenes that recur with varying conclusions. Even the flaky Euro-zoom-ins Hong has been using since 2004’s Woman Is the Future of Man now feel like auteurist flourishes, though they’re even funnier this time around, a bit like the zoom-ins in Buñuel’s final films, tightening in on characters as they begin to narrate us off on some new plot tangent, never to return. Except that Hong’s characters always do, over and over again, to hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking effect. Written by Hong Sang-soo. Photographed by Kim Hyung-koo. With Yu Jun-sang, Kim Sang-joong, Kim Bok-yung, Song Sun-mi. In Korean with subtitles. 79 min. Distributed by Cinema Guild.
Showtimes 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, 9:00 pm
Tickets $9 for SFFS members, $11 general, $10 senior/student/disabled. Box office opens April 2 online at sffs.org and in person at SF Film Society Cinema.
To request an interview contact hhart@sffs.org.
To request screeners contact bproctor@sffs.org.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
At SF Film Society Cinema, the stylish state-of-the art theater located in the New People building at 1746 Post Street (Webster/Buchanan) in Japantown, the San Francisco Film Society offers its acclaimed exhibition, education and filmmaker services programs and events on a daily year-round basis.
Upcoming San Francisco Film Society programs
Through March 29: Sound of Noise
Opening March 30: House of Pleasures
April 3: Qarantina
April 6: Character Comes First: Costume Design in the Movies
Opening April 6: This Is Not a Film
April 10: SFFS Film Arts Forum: Beyond Film School
Opening April 13: The Turin Horse
April 19-May 3: 55th San Francisco International Film Festival