Oki's Movie

Having seen so many films last week one after another, sometimes two or three movies a day,  I will probably have to checked through the ticket stubs to know exactly what number it is down my list of movies seen some of which I have not yet written about is Korean director Hong Sang-soo's Oki's Movie. Hong has won the Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 for his film Ha Ha Ha.  

In a way, this messing up of the boundaries between reality and real life may be exactly what I think Hong is trying to portray through this four part movie, told with different narrative perspectives: omnscient narrator and then the perspective of one of the central figures of the the love triangle Oki. (played by Jung Yumi)  

In the first episode "Day of Incantation", we are shown the male protagonist Jingu ( played by Lee Sung-Kun) down a street waiting for someone. Another woman then appears. She looks at a gate where Jingu was looking at and mentions a name. He complains why she should suddenly recall the name of one of her high school male friends. She says she does not know and that it just occurs to her. Then the two begin to look for the car which they parked in the vicinity in the course of which we hear her complaining that he never has time for her any more, being always occupied with his film production and is smoking and drinking too much. He asks for forgiveness and says that he is busy with course work and the upcoming film competition. But she is not appeased.

We are next shown Jingu talking to a fellow student actor as the director of his own film, saying how she doesn't say the lines of the dialogue with any conviction. She tries again but he is not satisfied. He scolds her. The lady says she cannot do it because she hasn't got it in her to fulfil his strict requirements. We see LJingu  very frustrated. He then walks down a university path by a lake, meets another lecturer, who tells him that he is disgusted that there will be a new professor Song (played by Moon Sung-keun) who pays off someone to get that tenured position and that money is killing film as an art form. He doesn't know that. He continues walking to cool his head, falls asleep. When he opens his eyes, he sees a lady photographer. He tells her she shouldn't take his photo without his consent. They got talking. She says she is a housewife and has just bought a camera which she is trying out. He ends up teaching her how to do so. 

The film then cuts into Lee and a group of teachers and students drinking in a restaurant in which we see Jingu  telling Song that there is a rumor and that it is important that Song clears his name but Song can't be bothered. Then later, we see Song discussing Jingu's project with him and encourages him to go ahead. We next see girls talking about how Song was impressed with the preliminary screening of Jingu's proto-copy and everyone tipping that Jingu would win the competition and how all the girls in the campus seems to have a crush upon him.

In the second episode "King of Kisses" we see Jingu looking at a girl, is impressed by her. They got talking. He follows her around and says how beautiful she is and forces a kiss upon her by a garden bench which she initially resists but then begins enjoying it saying how good a kisser he is.

In the third episode "After the Snowstorm" , we find Jingu waiting for Oki outside her room all night in the cold. The following morning, Oki discovers him, feels sorry for him and changes her mind about him. Jingu appears as obsessed with Oki as with his film making. Then on another cold morning, Jingu and Oki were the only students who turn up for Song's class, so they decided not to have any formal lecture and merely chit chat. Oki asks the professor many questions about life, love, meaning etc to which the professor gives some non-committal answer, saying that each one should find his own meaning.

After the formal screening of Jingu's film, there is a "meet the director" session. One female student asks a lot of personal question totally unrelated to the film about how Jingu had destroyed the life of her best friend who was about to be engaged because that girl fell in love with Jingu. Jingu replied that he did not recall anything about that and refuses to answer any further question on that issue. Not knowing that Oki also like the professor, he continues to go out with Oki. When the results are out, Jingu is not the winner. We find Song talking to Oki in a restaurant, drinking. He says that Oki should not go out with Jingu any more because otherwise he feels that he could not judge Lee's work with the kind of fairness that he deserves. 

Then in the final part, which Song uses as the title of the film, Oki's own story begins. She compares, using her own voice as the narrator, her two lovers both walking down the same garden path up Mount Acha in a park,separated by two years, reaching the same tree, going to the same pavilion and the same toilet in a documentary and student essay type of comparison of how their conduct, their talk, their attitude and her own feeling towards the two men both constantly loops back on each other in her memory and her consciousness.

The film ends by Professor Song walking to the tree on lst January of the new year to wait for Oki but finding that Oki is now with Jingu and walking away. He has previously told Oki that should they for any reason no longer be seeing each other or be separate, he would go there every lst day of January to wait for her to refresh the memory of the love they once had. He announces to the film school faculty member to their surprise of the rumor mongering lecturer that he will be leaving the university to follow another film project at the start of the next academic year.  

It is a semi-documentary, semi-feature film about the confusing world of filming making, film teaching, human relationship, jealousy, academic politics, envy, love, rumor, truth and the ambiguities and complexity of human lives, with moments of pathos, humor and sadness done in the inimitable and extremely idiosyncratic cubist style of of Hong. There are many levels of meaning: the so-called reality itself, the portrayal of that reality in film and the "fictive reality"of that "fictive reality" through the story being told by Oki. Is it a film about Oki's (who herself is but a fictitious character in Song's movie") "movie" about her two lovers? Is it a film about the complexities of relationship between Oki, Jingu and Song? Is Jingu and/or Song alter ego(s) for Hong?  What is the meaning of Oki's own film making? Is she using the production of a film as an ooccasion or by means of which she seeks to understand herself? Is the Oki's movie her personal exploration and a reflection of her own relationship with the opposite sex and her own life? Each episode is announced by Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, to make the film important or is its use ironic?