“In Hong’s bittersweet sonatas, typically composed of multiple movements, repeated figures and modulating motives, any relationship or situation is susceptible to variability: there can always be another version, another chance, another time. Some situations present themselves as repetitions, while others accommodate a myriad of storylines that intertwine or parallel each other. Every film contains multiple stories, and is also rich in virtual ones, some yet to be told, others perhaps already told before.”
Stoffel Debuysere
“If in previous films the resource of variation inside a variation allowed for an unfolding of time in two ways to discover the possibilities of the narrative and the characters, like an extrapolated literary exercise, in The Day After, this revisit of the same scene doesn’t deal with what ‘could have been’ but with the indifference to memories. The characters aren’t submitted to this double play of reality, but to confirm that the past is a certain fact of the flexible, forgettable or fragile.”
Mónica Delgado1
Jordan Cronk: Do you seek or find catharsis through filmmaking?
Hong Sang-soo: During the period of shooting and in the vicinity of shooting, I seem to encounter strange and lucky occurrences quite often. Now they have become the signs that show I’m working in the right attitude, and they also seem to be the force that creates the direction of the film. This kind of experience is so rare in my everyday life that I’ve come to cherish the experience of filmmaking as something extraordinary.
Hong Sang-soo in an interview in Film Comment2
“Ce qui devient clair, cette fois, à la seconde vision du Jour d’après, n’est pas la nature d’un travail sur le temps dont les spectateurs de Hong sont de longue date familiers. Ce qui devient clair, à présent, c’est combien la discontinuité hongienne est aussi bien une continuité. Sourde, sournoise voire menaçante, mais une continuité quand même. Si l’on suit l’enchaînement des scènes sans tenir compte de la différence entre les deux femmes, Areum et Changsook – l’ancienne assistante, la maîtresse de Bongwan, comme on ne tarde pas à le comprendre –, alors le récit semble en effet se dérouler, pour un temps au moins, de manière tout à fait linéaire.”
Emmanuel Burdeau3
- 1Mónica Delgado, “Cannes 2017: The Day After by Hong Sang-soo,” Desistfilm, May 2017.
- 2Jordan Cronk, “Interview: Hong Sangsoo,” Film Comment, July 2017.
- 3Emmanuel Burdeau, “« Le Jour d'après »: (dis)continuités de Hong Sang-soo,” Mediapart, 10 juin 2017.