Critics reviews

Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing.

Not only is there already a much better version of that story (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), there’s already a much better Korean version of that story as well (Kim Ki-duk’s Time). Though this is the only one that explicitly argues against any limit whatsoever on soju consumption. That’s very Hong.

This approach makes Yourself and Yours, one of four films he's released in the last calendar year, so beguiling. It's a familiar Hong tale — breakups and drunken ramblings set across a handful of specific locations that we return to again and again — but it's temporally conventional, at least for the viewer. Rather than a time loop imposed upon the characters, Yourself and Yours allows its protagonist to assert a break in linear comprehension — and she drags everyone else along with her.

Representatives of the patriarchy are more manipulative and aggressive in Hong Sang-soo's quiet, equally short Yourself and Yours, which makes for a wittier, stranger, more hard-assed film [than Hermia & Helena].

When the heartbroken Youngsoo tries in vain to be let into his ex-girlfriend Minjung's house, he's greeted by another woman walking up the road. The camera pans right to frame her as she cheerfully calls his name, then pans back to Youngsoo as he keeps ringing the doorbell. The woman never appears again; it's unclear whether she even existed. This incident is one of many mysteries in what is arguably the Korean auteur's most confounding work.

Hong always has another card up his sleeve, and Yourself and Yours, while not as ingenious as his previous entry Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), is satisfyingly teasing. It also yields one of the most flagrantly self-indulgent trailers I know: faithful to the movie, but frustrating in just the right ways.

Hong Sang-soo's latest considers post-breakup misery and the role-playing, (necessarily?) amnesiac aspect of initiating romantic relationships, here heightened for deliriously comic effect. Yourself and Yours concludes on an ambiguously optimistic note, that might best be interpreted broadly as a reminder to - as Tony Soprano once put it - focus on the good times.

The piercingly quiet derision of Hong's bitter ironies makes "Yourself and Yours" a comedy of sorts, but one in which the laughter leaves viewers perched embarrassingly at the glass-walled edge of a trompe-l'oeil abyss.

With last year's Right Now, Wrong Then, Hong's most accomplished, tightly conceptualized, and deeply felt film to date, there is a sense that Hong's outlook had warmed considerably. This has carried over into Yourself and Yours. For all his characters' many flaws, not to mention the haphazardness of their circumstances, Hong's men and women are increasingly finding their way to moments of happiness, even if only fleeting or dreamed.

Hong has effectively constructed a narrative in which every character is conceivably culpable of committing an act that adversely effects those around them, and without just cause. More impressive still, these unresolved sources of blame allow for a reflexive empathy.

Though Hong elicits Youngsoo's heartsick proclamations for comedy, to some extent he buys into the underlying romanticism. As ever, though, this South Korean auteur remains a realist about love. Amid the identity-shifting game-playing of Yourself and Yours, Hong's view of relationships as founded on a necessary preservation of a certain degree of illusion comes through loud and clear.

As always with Hong (and all good art), the what is less important than the why, and Yourself and Yours is slowly revealed as another nimble investigation into the communication barriers men and women often erect between each other. It's alternately caustic and sweet, leading to one of Hong's most hopeful conclusions. And since cautious optimism can feel like a complete triumph at a film festival, Hong's film was a beautiful way to leave Toronto.