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‘The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo doubles the emotional stakes of this cinema-centric romance by doubling the drama itself. It’s the story of a well-known art-house filmmaker, Ham Chunsu (Jeong Jae-yeong), who has a day to kill before introducing his new movie at a festival in the town of Suwon. Visiting a shrine, he meets Heejung (Kim Min-hee), a young artist, who—awed by his renown—invites him to her studio. There, he expresses an interest in her work; then, in the course of a shambling evening of drinking, he admits his attraction to her.

For an hour, Hong follows the ups and downs of this incipient relationship, and then he does it again, starting the story over from scratch and showing what Ham and Heejung could have done differently. Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, painful drama at the intersection of art and life, which strain under the burden of personal history. Together, the two parts form a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination and audacity in intimate experience and filmmaking alike. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship blends artistic bravado with metaphysical wonder and agonized regret.’ The New Yorker

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