The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 1-7
The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996)
Directed by Hong Sang-soo
Hong is often accused of making the same film every time, a claim that over the course of twenty-plus years of filmmaking he has proven to be flagrantly untrue. Like those of his reference points Resnais and Rohmer, Hong’s films pay keen attention to subtle shifts in human behavior, often posing variations on the same basic situations to see how people react to various obstacles interfering with their performances of themselves. His well-composed widescreen frames bring documentary to fiction by allowing us to see the physical and social contexts that characters inhabit. The films, typically called romantic comedies, often express painful humor as they show amorous feelings being left unrequited.
Hong’s debut feature marks the closest that he has come to realizing a thriller, albeit an existential one. Four of his students wrote screenplays, each one focused upon an urban adult; Hong then gave the scripts to four different actors and encouraged them to improvise their dialogue. The resulting interwoven episodes follow a suite of anxious people throughout dissatisfying sex and other forms of communication: A self-loathing young novelist (played by Kim Yui-seong), the young box office worker who hopelessly loves him (Cho Eun-sook), the married woman he pursues who comes to see him as a safety valve (Lee Eung-kyung), and the woman’s weak-willed husband (Park Jin-seong), who tries to keep her under his control while finding that he can’t control himself. Aaron Cutler (June 4, 1:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Hong retrospective)
