What Sang-soo Hong manages here is just, Diabolically delightful! The prolific South Korean filmmaker's ability to construct such rich films around such seemingly simple premises is unparalleled. Yourself and Yours, which finally got a release stateside, features a host of Hong's signature traits - binge drinking, male embarrassment, repetition - and yet it's one of his most pervasive and enjoyable entrants in his ouevre, a film which manages to be cutting and incisive while maintaining an aura of playfulness that is hard not to love. Hong is one of those filmmakers who simply put, makes me ashamed whenever I watch one of his films - His conceits themselves are by-and-large so simple, yet so sharp and funny, often leaving me wondering how I never thought of such a premise. The characters in Yourself and Yours are humanistic and encapsulate a sense of longing, exhibiting the tricky nature of affection and deep-seeded desire for connection and companionship. Perhaps they are singularly focused on themselves, but isn't the pursuit of love intrinsically selfish, at least initially? The notion of "truth" vs. "fiction" is juxtaposed with this intrinsic impulse, with the femme fatale type character whom sits at the fulcrum of the story being the vessel which serves Hong's intentions. Employing a cunning repetitious structure, Hong's film is rich in artifice yet it manages to constantly excavate humanistic sensibilities centered around the embarrassment and myopia intrinsic to the pursuit of companionship
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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