Right Now, Wrong Then

Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then has been billed as an ​“anti-romance” – a label that isn’t quite true, although it isn’t firm­ly a love sto­ry either. It has some of the fun­ni­est moments of any film this year, but it also fea­tures scenes of such heart-rend­ing sad­ness that you couldn’t pos­si­bly call it a comedy.

Good roman­tic come­dies are so few and far between these days that the against-the-grain exis­tence of the South Kore­an writer/director’s lat­est is a bless­ing for audi­ences who enjoy see­ing like­able human char­ac­ters fall in love on screen. Jeong Jae-yeong stars as Cheon-soo, a well-known, slight­ly smug film­mak­er who arrives in Suwon a day ear­ly for a uni­ver­si­ty screen­ing of one of his movies. Decid­ing to explore the city on his own, he wan­ders into an old palace and comes across Hee-jeong (the superb Kim Min-hee), a young, melan­cholic mod­el-turned-painter who hasn’t seen any of his films but has heard promis­ing things. They spend the day togeth­er: loung­ing around in her stu­dio, eat­ing sushi, get­ting wast­ed, attend­ing a par­ty at her friends’ home. But then Cheon-soo says some­thing that puts a drag on the date and their flir­ta­tion is bungled.

Were the film to end there, it would still be a love­ly missed con­nec­tion, tinged with real romance and rue­ful­ness. But Sang-soo has more exper­i­men­tal means in mind and the film sud­den­ly resets, retelling Cheon-soo and Hee-jeong’s ren­dezvous in the same set­ting but with sly­ly pro­nounced dif­fer­ences in the char­ac­ters’ emo­tions, respons­es, and cir­cum­stances. A glow­ing review from the first half becomes a cut­ting cri­tique in the sec­ond. A meet­ing of friends goes com­i­cal­ly awry. And yet these aren’t dia­met­ri­cal­ly dis­sim­i­lar encoun­ters. He’s still some­thing of an oper­a­tor, yet some­how more heav­i­ly besot­ted. She’s still pal­pa­bly unhap­py, but also less inclined to quell her frus­tra­tions or stom­ach his bullshit.

Sang-soo is a film­mak­er who has long been inter­est­ed in rebuk­ing cin­e­mat­ic tra­di­tions of time, view­point and nar­ra­tive struc­ture. In Right Now, Wrong Then, he has found the per­fect prick­ly blend of these defi­ant instincts. His film has the same frisky, dawdling spir­it of Richard Linklater’s Before tril­o­gy, in fact it’s sort of like watch­ing two Before Sun­ris­es for the price of one, even though this sin­gu­lar dip­tych ulti­mate­ly proves even more adept at expand­ing the world beyond its cen­tral pair.

In pre­sent­ing two sub­tly dif­fer­ent ver­sions of same sto­ry, Sang-soo ful­ly immers­es us in Cheon-soo and Hee-jeong, plumb­ing them through the acute and nood­ly obser­va­tions of his writ­ing and the deft­ness of Park Hong-yeol’s cam­er­a­work, all unfussy sta­t­ic shots and pur­pose­ful zooms. He fre­quent­ly lingers on the actors in smooth long takes that afford them the free­dom to casu­al­ly com­pose their char­ac­ters in the moment, enabling reac­tions of pleas­ing­ly unfil­tered spon­tane­ity. You can put togeth­er the frag­ments of Cheon-soo’s back­sto­ry in the fid­gety man­ner in which Jae-yeong dodges a ques­tion and piece togeth­er Hee-jeong’s his­to­ry through the del­i­cate expres­sions that Min-hee hides from every­one, except us.

There’s sim­ply more than meets the eye in Sang-soo’s lat­est gem. You can turn it in any direc­tion or look at it from any angle and there is invari­ably a new streak of colour you have yet to see.