“To premiere one film at Cannes is an honor,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “Being granted two slots in the lineup is a major distinction indeed. But for the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, the two new films he is showing at the festival, The Day After and Claire’s Camera, do not even comprise his entire output in 2017. Earlier this year, Mr. Hong’s On the Beach at Night Alone was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, where its lead actress won a prize. . . . ‘Nobody probes deeper into the ways that men and women misread each other’s feelings than Hong Sangsoo,’ the critic and programmer Tony Rayns, an authority on Mr. Hong and Asian cinema, has written. ‘The Korean Woody Allen’ is the way Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes festival, referred to him.” And a conversation with the filmmaker follows.
Daniel Kasman in the Notebook on The Day After: “Fidelity, time and choice are the subjects, introduced in the remarkably condensed opening, where small book publisher Bongwan (Kwon Haehyo) is accused over breakfast by his wife Haejoo (Cho Yunhee) of cheating. He responds with nothing more than defensive, derisive silent chuckles. When he leaves for work we see scenes of him flirting with this possible lover (Kim Saebyuk), but when he arrives at the office, he discovers another woman, Areum—Kim Minhee again, now consecrated as a figure of strong independence and sensibility in Hong’s world. She's the beautiful new hire starting on her first day and, we quickly find out, is filling the position left vacant by Bongwan’s lover.” This Competition entry shows “yet again that this director too often dismissed of making similar movies in fact contains in himself as many clever possibilities and proposals as his plots.”
The A.V. Club’s A. A. Dowd: “Gorgeously shot in black-and-white and featuring the usual long, baggy, revealing conversations that are Hong’s speciality, The Day After gets by on the farcical nature of its entanglements—in moments, it plays like a delightful comedy of misunderstanding.”
Variety’s Guy Lodge calls The Day After “a loquacious, Rohmer-kissed comedy of missed chances and misunderstandings, in which matters of the heart are drawlingly discussed over lashings of soju. Lacking the emotional and structural complexity of some recent Hong outings, it’s minor even by his minor-key standards, though regular acolytes will drink up.”
“In terms of the mise-en-scene,” writes Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter, “the setups are straightforward, with many of the conversations taking place over tables with the characters facing each other and the camera simply panning left or right from an initial two-shot to emphasize either a sentence of dialogue or a reaction on either side of the table. The zooms here are less brusque than in his last couple of features, lending the films a more wistful, almost French New Wave quality that is further reinforced by the repeated use of a short piece of melancholy, electronic-sounding music credited to the director as well. This is cinematographer Kim Hyungku’s fifth collaboration with Hong and his first since 2013’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, though The Day After is closest, because of its fine use of black-and-white, to their The Day He Arrives (2011). In Hong’s oeuvre, even the titles start to sound alike.”
“The narrative consists of several long-running conversations, sometimes broken up by moments we sometimes assume are flashbacks but are eventually slyly revealed to be a continuation of the present sequence,” notes Nicholas Bell at Ioncinema. “A major upset occurs in the rather violent face-off between Minhee and Cho Yunhee, which reveals a bit more physicality than we’re accustomed to in a Sangsoo feature.”
“Kim Minhee gives an excellent performance as the assistant who shows every sign of being far cleverer, and more committed to writing and literature, than the complacent mediocrity who has hired her and even now shows every sign of wanting to abuse her trust and break her heart the way he did to her predecessor,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. All in all, The Day After “feels like a chapter from something bigger.”
Writing for Screen, Wendy Ide suggests that even “the most dedicated fans of the director’s work might find this story a little too diffuse and meandering, its rewards too deeply buried beneath the evasive wordiness.” More from Pierce Conran (ScreenAnarchy) and Barbara Scharres (RogerEbert.com).
“When I finish a film, I tend to fix a time to shoot my next film,” Hong tells Lee Hyo-won in the Hollywood Reporter. “I’m thinking that October of this year might be a good time to shoot something. As to what I’ll shoot, I have no idea.”
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