The awkward truth: failure to romance and the art of decoupling in the films of Hong Sang-soo

Abstract

Hong Sang-soo’s films are famous for their persistent exploration of failed personal relationships. Hong’s obsessive passion for baring the truth about men and women in contemporary South Korea drives his experiments in narration, minimalist aesthetic, and improvisational style. Hong’s films are the antidote to syrupy date films; stripped of romance, even the occasional meet-cute scenes quickly sour and expire. Sex scenes are awkward and passionless, every chance encounter leading to drunken folly and disillusionment, and rarely do characters actually evolve. It is striking that Hong stubbornly refuses to inject any sentimentality into the meetings of men and women; and yet he appears to be under some compulsion to revisit these same stories again and again. This article approaches Hong’s work as an update and revision of the classical romantic comedy. It prioritizes Hong’s candid look at human weaknesses and insecurities and how he seeks to dismantle any idealized vision of two perfect strangers coming together happily. By bracketing Hong’s films as a deconstruction of the long-standing traditions that mythologize true love, the article identifies the dialogic relationship of these films to the romantic comedy genre, and interprets their idiosyncratic structure and style as an explicit critique of modern love.