Winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo’s 17th feature is a wry, humorous deconstruction of courtship rituals and the offhand decisions that drastically alter everyday experiences. Structured in two contrasting parts and suffused with the director’s trademark flair for situational comedy (often fueled by copious amounts of soju), Right Now, Wrong Then centers on an at once ingratiating and enervating encounter between a wayward film director (Jeong Jaeyoung) and an aspiring young painter (Kim Minhee) who meet by chance at a hillside temple and decide to spend an increasingly eventful evening together––before doubling back on itself to tell the same story once more but with slight variations to the characters’ dialogue and demeanor, prompting an entirely different, evermore awkward outcome. Playful and of unassuming insight, Hong’s latest brings his career-long fascination with the paradoxes of the male-female dynamic and the inherent irony of the human condition to beautifully reciprocal new ends, highlighting the nascent volatility in even the most casual of conversations.
~ Join us for a post-screening reception on Cinefamily's back patio.
Hong's masterpiece.
- Roger Koza, Cinema Scope
[A] funny, ingenious, and prickly movie. It isn’t as if the scenes show two possible fallouts from the same event; instead, they show two possible ways in which the dynamic between these characters could be imagined, two different ratios in which these personalities could be combined.
- Max Nelson, Film Comment
Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.
- Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Though ill-fated, the first [part] is characteristically light-hearted and hilarious, whereas the second is marked by genuine and escalating pathos. Together, they offer both a meta-reflection on the subtleties of filmmaking and a modest, trenchant meditation on the human condition.
- Giovanni Marchini Camia, Filmmaker Magazine
What’s so satisfying—and in its own way, romantic—about the film is the feeling it leaves that two regularly and relatably lonely people have given and taken something valuable to and from each other. It’s not a put-down to say that the film feels a bit like a variation on Before Sunrise where a Meet Cute doesn’t yield the love of a lifetime, or even a one-night stand. Rather, it unfolds the sort of incongruously emotionally intense experience that lingers even after the return to the everyday.
- Adam Nayman, Reverse Shot
(Available to download after screening date)