On the Beach at Night Alone
ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE, drama, not rated, in Korean, English, and German with subtitles, The Screen, 2 chiles
One could take the title On the Beach at Night Alone as a metaphor for the pain and longing of its heroine Young-hee (Min-hee Kim), an actress who recently had an affair with her married director. In making the film, South Korean writer-director Sang-soo Hong is said to have taken inspiration from his own real-life drama. He had a relationship with his star, Kim, whose career then suffered from the negative publicity.
Hong’s dramatization of these events through fictional characters is personal, but it’s also self-indulgent. If at first you sympathize with Young-hee, who spends most of the film in barely concealed melancholy, by the end, you wish she would snap out of it. An old friend comments that her director love has stopped making movies, suggesting that he, too, is profoundly affected by their affair. Is he worthy of the exalted sorrow that she feels? It’s obvious that he’s all she thinks about. She draws his face in the sand by the water.
The story is told in two chapters. The first one is set in Hamburg, where Young-hee is visiting a friend and waiting for her lover, who says he’s coming but may not be. While out by a lake, there is an odd moment where she seems to have disappeared, having wandered into the waters only to reappear a moment later in the distance, carried aloft on the back of an unidentified man. This ambiguous figure is, perhaps, a projection of the director himself. While left unexplained, the scene underscores her longing and attachment to the man who never comes. This ends the first part of the film only about 25 minutes in, as the credits roll. The next time we see her, she’s alone in an empty movie theater just as the lights are coming up, reminding us, perhaps, that this is a story of art imitating life.
The second part is set in South Korea, where Young-hee is rootless and haunted, singing songs of unrequited love to herself. There are many prolonged, naturalistic scenes of dialogue that take place in cafés, domestic interiors, or simply when walking about — all of which become repetitive. Young-hee never fully exposes herself and her feelings until a late, drunken dinner scene when she finally has an opportunity to confront the director, thereby forcing him to expose his own feelings.
An hour and forty minutes of watching someone’s dreamy remorse and grieving for lost love is tiring, though the movie is beautifully filmed with atmospheric, twilit landscapes, and well-acted, with occasional insights into the nature of romantic love. It offers some self-reflective humor about how men view women as well as how women see men.
But Hong seems too invested in using his art as a means of rationalizing his actions through his characters. Young-hee sums up this sad tale perfectly herself when she tells the director, “Personal stories are boring.”