Reseñas de la crítica

With everybody in on the gag, authorial omniscience results in agency for all—we're free to ponder a multitude of different relationships between the film's two halves. Right Now, Wrong Then as a viewing experience feels a culmination of Hong's accumulated experiments at twinning and doubling back.

Slyly winking at the now-universal notion of Hong Sang-soo as the most repetitive filmmaker in the world (a party line obligatorily rehashed in nearly every article on the director), Right Now, Wrong Then goes ahead and plays pretty much the same hour-long movie twice, back-to-back, and it's as good a movie as any Hong has cooked up.

Chun-su offers two interpretations of Hee-jung's work. In the first, he commends her for daring to take an unknown path to discover the "hidden things laying at the surface of our lives." The second reverses the earlier praise. Instead of displaying courage, he says, the painting provides a way of concealing her feelings. Both are right and both are wrong, depending on how you look into the prism of Hong's beguiling film.

It works as a statement of purpose of sorts for the filmmaker, a twist on Vivian Mercier's description of Waiting for Godot as "a play in which nothing happens, twice." In Hong's cinema, _nothing_ never happens, even in the most outwardly static of moments. In this absence, his cup runneth over.

Two great films in one? Or one great film split in two? Either way, Hong Sang-soo's biting, experimental and daring comedy emphasizes the importance of details—in narrative structure, language, miscommunication and romance. Jung Jae-young's brazenly funny performance hints at the ache of a man who's become quite friendly with regret.

...In the "Wrong Now" section, we get a seemingly unmotivated close-up of Chunsu, which then pulls back to the two shot. But these moments are deployed with the kind of subtle precision with which a writer would use paragraph breaks or semicolons. They signal otherwise imperceptible seismic disturbances in the surface of interpersonal relations, and these vibrations are not the same across the two halves of the film.

Maybe fate is indifferent to how we aspire to be, maybe our inner natures are more rigidly defined than we'd like to think, or maybe Hong is just having fun with us. He's certainly having fun with his actors, eliciting wonderful comic performances and an ingratiatingly casual vibe. Still, there's a rigorous formal sensibility beneath the casualness, as evidenced by the characteristically scrupulous framing and the careful narrative rhymes and half-rhymes.

The singular Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has been making variations on the same movie for years. His latest, you might say, is a variation on a variation, incisively examining the budding relationship (which is fraught, as per usual, with soju-soused fear, anxiety and depression) between a filmmaker (Jeong Jae-yeong) and the painter (Kim Min-hee) he meets by chance.

Jeong and Kim have terrific chemistry together, especially as Cheon-soo and Hee-jeong get progressively drunker over the course of the day (in both versions). It's a constant pleasure just watching them tentatively thrust and parry, both in relatively quiet moments and in broad, crowd-pleasing set pieces. This is a comedy of embarrassment with a touchingly optimistic streak, and it carves out a space in contemporary cinema that resembles little else.

Like Tsai Ming-liang (with whom he otherwise shares absolutely nothing in common), Hong is becoming less explicit and more Buddhist; his statue here looms over the heroine's house. Getting frenzied is better for getting viewer attention: Right Now, Wrong Then is, for this master filmmaker, a straight down the middle effort, which doesn't mean it's not essential—following Hong's variations on a theme makes each installment richer.

Hong Sangsoo's films make us realize that people like Chunsu have the potential to make life pretty dreadful for themselves and everyone around them, so thank goodness for providence—and a master manipulator like Hong Sangsoo—for saving everyone from the brink.

...The two long takes suggest a good deal about how Hong manipulates the romance at the center of this funny, ingenious, and prickly movie. It isn't as if the scenes show two possible fallouts from the same event; instead, they show two possible ways in which the dynamic between these characters could be imagined, two different ratios in which these personalities could be combined.