When a friend stands him up, creatively blocked film director Seongjun finds himself wandering the streets of Seoul’s Bukchon district over several days. Along the way, he encounters old friends, actresses and ex-lovers while drinking countless bottles of soju, leading to drunken conversations and romantic endeavours in what appears to be a loop of reconnections. But does Seongjun keep reliving the same events, as if trapped in repetition, or are these encounters always new? A signature Hong Sangsoo film, containing many of the themes and playful narrative puzzles that define his cinematic vision.
“Near the end of Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Muriel, a man sings a music hall chanson about time and memory that mournfully repeats the word déjà to emphasize the rue of those who “fear the future, regret the past.” He could be describing Hong Sang-soo’s aimless characters – “I have nowhere to go,” Seongjun says at the outset of The Day He Arrives – trapped in the past, their prospects tentative save for one sad certainty: routine will become the eternal return.””
James Quandt / Sabzian
“It’s a puzzling, fascinating fugue of a movie, toying with time with an unnerving subtlety. Temporal oddities–what appear at first to be continuity errors–accumulate until the film’s narrative becomes a Chinese puzzle, complex yet rewarding in its demonstrations of the plasticity of narrative structure, the stuff of fictional reality, and, by extension, the stories we tell ourselves about our own realities.”
Clinton Krute / BOMB Magazine
