Nobody’s Daughter Haewon
While we were in Lisbon, it was not only the 40th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, but there also was an international film festival, IndieLisboa. They had a rather large selection of movies, most of which I didn’t know anything about. We wanted to see at least one film at the festival, just for fun. Luckily, all of us are into Hong Sang-soo so the choice for “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon” was quickly made.
In fact, words cannot describe why I am into Hong Sang-soo so much. Maybe I just love his slightly gimmicky nonlinear writing style? The many layers and repetitions of shots, dialogue snippets and characters are something rather unique to him, and I am in love with it. Actually I think that “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon” is even a little bit more mature than that, there is less reality blurring but the nonlinearity mostly serves to tell the story with a higher emotional impact. In this film, there are some parallel storylines which are told sequentially, and it is only at the very end that they merge together and the audience gets the conclusion of it all. Repeated dialogue snippets can confuse the whole thing but sometimes their outfits tell you which day you are on.
Apart from all that, I also thought that “Haewon” was the funniest of the three Hong Sang-soo films I have seen. I almost burst out into laughter a few times, not because it was so ha-ha-funny but rather because the scenes felt so taken out of real life that it makes me laugh. The best scene is perhaps the one where the director starts sobbing by himself on the top of the mountain, closely followed by the other students gossiping about Haewon. “I heard her mother drives a Jaguar!” Priceless.
They gave out voting leaflets on which you could give the film 1 to 5 points. I was the only one amongst us who gave it a 5! XD Well, in the end I think I was just madly in love with the movie. The rule “If you watched one Hong Sang-soo movie, you watched them all” is still true, but this one hit home with the whiny director and the poor girl who ended up becoming his mistress. If at least one of Hong Sang-soo’s other films is just as great as this one, then he might make it pretty high on the list of Korean directors (though Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook can probably never be overtaken). I need to watch “Oki’s movie” and “Night and Day”.