Grasshopper Film’s Ryan Krivoshey is slowly building his company’s year one slate and has picked up one of the best undistributed films from South Korea’s most prolific auteur filmmaker. The big winner at Locarno this past August, and voted as Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2015, Hong Sangsoo’s Right Now, Wrong Then will be released theatrically sometime this year.
Gist: This is about an arthouse film director and an aspiring painter meet and spend the same day together, twice. Quite by accident, Chunsu arrives in town a day early. With time to kill before his lecture the next day, Chunsu stops by a restored, old palace and meets a fledgling artist, Yoon Heejung. She’s never seen any of his films, but knows he’s famous. They talk. And together, they go to Heejung’s workshop to look at her paintings, have Sushi and Soju. More conversation follows, and drinks, and then an awkward get-together with friends where all sorts of secrets are revealed. All the while, Chunsu and Yoon may or may not be falling for each other. Then, quite unexpectedly, we begin again, but now things appear somewhat different.
Worth Noting: This was also presented at the ’15 edition of the Toronto and New York Film Festivals.
Do We Care?: Our Nicholas Bell caught this double Locarno winner at TIFF (★★★½) and cited that this is “another example of the filmmaker’s delicate rendering of the difficulties in communication, Song-soo takes one scenario and charts a compelling ripple of cause and effect.”
