A beach is always a contemplative site in cinema, and South Korean director Hong Sang-soo seems to return to it as a space for his characters. On The Beach At Night Alone (2017) features two beaches – one in Hamburg, the other in South Korea – and neither takes place in the pitch-black of night where the sea and sky are indivisible. Rather, they both border on evening, and each beach is cold and grey, framing the solitary figure Young-hee (Kim Min-hee) within a lonely atmosphere. If the viewer wasn’t familiar with Sang-soo’s whole thing as a director, nor the real life events it seems to be processing and reflecting, would they still find it compelling? I think so – Min-hee is an engaging presence, and it’s cinematic enough to see her stand in a coat, smoking on a cigarette, and for the camera to observe her character’s contemplation.
Divided into two parts, we begin in Hamburg where Young-hee, an actor, is visiting and spending time with a friend, Jee-young (Seo Young-hwa); they walk and talk, look for something to eat, visit a bookstore. Young-hee has left South Korea after a public scandal due to an affair she has entered into with a married film director. Waiting for him to visit, and thinking of how she wants to live her life in the wake of it, the movie also introduces surreal elements, one scene in particular that surprises and is left hanging in the viewer’s mind: “What did that mean?” and “Will it come back again?” This allows an element of tension and mystery to permeate the everyday reality of Young-hee’s character. We then catch up with her returning to Korea, a small town where she bumps into old friends and acquaintances, sits and drinks, and eventually her reserved poise turns to anger and frustration.
While the title I believe is based off a Walt Whitman poem, the film carries through with its promise of loneliness and introspection. Of course, everything has another layer of meaning if aware that Sang-soo was married when he and Kim Min-hee began a relationship during the making of the film, Right Then, Wrong Now; she has since been a regular star and featured player, and collaborative element in his following movies. Reading interviews with Sang-soo, it’s interesting to hear how he makes his films, waking up early to write a scene that will eventually be shot later that day with his crew, the sense of opening improvisation when he begins a project, leading to a further shape with each new scene, shot basically in order of how it appears:
“I know that reality is something I can never reach out and grab. We are all living under the influence of being human beings, so it is a good thing that it is unattainable. Even though I feel totally lost, even though I feel pain, it’s not real, in a way.”
While scenes recurred from previous Sang-soo movies I’d seen, like The Woman Who Ran and Introduction, I do think this is one of his strongest, buoyed by Min-hee’s great central performance, and its thorny fictionalised take on what would be common knowledge to Korean audiences and cineastes. Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 