SFFILM 62 Day 5: Winter's Night

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival began Wednesday night and runs through April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A scene from Jang Woo-jin's Winter's Night, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Winter's Night (SOUTH KOREA: Jang Woo-jin, 2018)
playing: 5:30PM today at BAMPFA in Berkeley, and Monday, Apr 15 at 8:30PM at the Children's Creativity Museum Theatre.

Have you ever had one of those weird nights? The ones where you can't sleep and you end up doing things you never would under ordinary circumstances? If not, perhaps you've been caught up in someone else's weird night, which can end up making your own night pretty weird anyway.

The third film from 34-year-old director Jang Woo-jin (and the first I've had the chance to see) Winter's Night takes this premise and gives it a uniquely Korean spin. It turns out Hong Sangsoo doesn't have a monopoly on comedies about soju-infused middle-aged men unable to control their feelings for unavailable women. I was a little disappointed that SFFILM this year declined to program either of Hong's most recent efforts, Grass or Hotel By the River, making Frisco Bay four feature films behind the prolific auteur's output (unless I've somehow overlooked a showing of The Day After or Nobody's Daughter Haewon in a local venue.) But putting that disappointment aside, Winter's Night provides a fresh perspective on some of the same material Hong works with, and quite a bit of other material as well. In fact, there's enough different that I wouldn't even bring up Hong at all, if the comparison didn't feel invited by Jang's chosen setting, the tourist-centric Kangwon Province that provided the backdrop and the title for Hong's second feature film, and by the casting of Seo Young-hwa, a veteran of at least six Hong films including prior SFFILM selections Hill of Freedom and Right Now, Wrong Then.

Seo plays Eun-ju, wife to the aforementioned middle-aged man Heung-ju (played by Yang Heung-ju), spending time together on a vacation to the region important to their mutual history more than thirty years ago, when he was fulfilling military service and she was traveling from Seoul to visit him. After visiting a thousand-year-old mountain temple she realizes in a taxicab that she'd left her phone behind. They return to look for it but are still unsuccessful by the time the temple's closed for the night and, after Eun-ju's aborted attempt to sneak onto the grounds, the couple resigns to staying overnight at the handiest guesthouse. There seems to be an eerie aura at this place, and it's not just the LED lights flooding the nearby frozen waterfall. The couple keep getting separated, and running into other unexpected denizens of the dark, including a seeming set of younger doppelgangers, and one of Heung-ju's old flames, whom he drunkenly makes passes at after an excruciating karaoke session.

Ultimately Winter's Light is a very accomplished example of the established "slow cinema" movement that seems to be waning from local festival screens when compared to its relative dominance 10-15 years ago. Jang has an intriguing concept, a middle-aged couple being tested by unusual, if not quite extraordinary, circumstances, and he keeps it fun and fresh by highlighting the comedy of situations more akin to the ironic stance of a Tsai Ming-Liang than to a ponderous Tarkovsky. In one scene, Heung-ju frantically searches for his wife, inquiring with a local innkeeper, when suddenly she steps into the frame as if she's been watching him all along. "Don't lose her again, you clumsy man!" is the inkeeper's droll response. Jang often transitions between scenes by inserting frames of a series of traditional Korean paintings that, upon accumulation over the film started reminding me of the famous ox-herding pictures associated with a strand of Zen Buddhism. I'd be curious to view Winter's Light again with these ancient prompts for contemplation in mind.

SFFILM62 Day 5
Other festival options: The festival has been really pushing the Castro's noontime showing of Photograph with its star Nawazuddin Siddiqui in attendance; I guess word hasn't gotten out to the Bollywood-loving community as pervasively as happened when Shah Rukh Khan appeared there a couple years ago and I got to see firsthand the closest thing to Beatlemania I suspect I'm ever likely to experience. Either that or Siddiqui's not quite the draw that SRK is; I know him mostly from Ashim Ahluwalia's 2012 "Hindie" film Miss Lovely, but I guess he's probably made more fans in movies like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox, the latter of which was, like Photograph, directed by Ritesh Batra. After that show, the Castro will make way for an award presentation to Laura Dern and a screening of Trial By Fire, with its director Edward Zwick also expected to attend. Finally, I've been hearing good buzz on the Argentinian feature Rojo, including from my friend Michael Hawley, whose festival preview is the best I've found, as usual, even though he's no longer even living in Frisco Bay! It screens at BAMPFA at 8PM, after Winter's Night wraps up.

Non-SFFILM option: Today's the final day of the all-35mm Stanford Theatre's annual Alfred Hitchcock series -- sort of. While Psycho and The Trouble With Harry showing today for the final times (a late afternoon and an evening show each) marks the end of the schedule published in late February, the venue has recently announced its first-ever Doris Day series, to open next weekend with prints of two of her mid-1950s films Young At Heart and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The latter of course is a Hitchcock title as well, thus extending the Master of Suspense's grip on Palo Alto's jewel of a theatre for one more week. Though I wouldn't expect the 97-year-old Day to make the trip up from her Carmel home to attend any of these showings, I do hope to see at least one of the films she made with Frank Tashlin (ideally Glass Bottom Boat) in the program somewhere, and hopefully not the same weekend as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.