The Day After is one of two films by Hong Sang-soo screening as part of the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate (the other being On the Beach at Night Alone) and, as Zach Lewis notes at In Review Online, the “initial setup is familiar: Bong-wan (Kwon Hae-hyo), an independent book publisher, hires a new assistant, Areum [Kim Min-hee], after his previous one, Chang-sook (Kim Sae-byuk), quits. Bong-wan’s wife, Hae-joo (Jo Yoon-hee), then discovers a love affair between Bong-wan and his assistant, only to mistakenly castigate Areum instead of the real culprit, Chang-sook. The rest of The Day After manages to slightly break form, playing similar notes but in a slightly different key. Instead of ascertaining a casual, slow-building relay of drunken infidelity, the women here immediately grasp Bong-wan’s sins and put him on an endless kangaroo court trial.”
“As with most Hong films,” writes Chuck Bowen at Slant, “The Day After engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos, representing its hero’s own attempt to rationalize behavioral chaos with tidy structures and neat justifications. Hong uses a distinctive formality that’s designed to highlight its own inadequacy—a daring, self-interrogating hat trick that he’s managed to pull off with stunning consistency over the years, forging a cumulative tapestry of the frailties of the creative male ego.”
“Hong doesn’t bifurcate the film into mirroring sections as such; still, events rhyme,” writes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov. “This isn’t my favorite Hong hall of mirrors — it’s a little too trapped in a familiar pattern of events without any truly startling punctuations, save the jaw-dropping final scene, in which Bongwan takes a really long time to recognize Ahreum and the fact that they’re having a conversation, verbatim, they had at the beginning of the film. This scene’s been called unrealistic, but I’d suggest that’s actually totally right-on for a dude who’s half out of a bag more often than not.”
“The Day After is a light snack presented as a meal,” finds Cosmo Bjorkenheim at Screen Slate. “The ‘bourgeois frustration’-genre can be done a lot better, perhaps by giving the professional-middle-aged-male protagonist less cliché problems than a jealous wife. The risk that a filmmaker takes when baring his vague feelings of existential vacuity is that of transmitting them to the viewer, which Hong has unfortunately done here.”
The Oklahoma Museum of Art’s Michael J. Anderson couldn’t disagree more, calling The Day After “a very strong contender for the best film of twenty-seventeen . . . It is a work of both summation and specificity, both for its novel structural interventions, à la French New Wave master Jacques Rivette, and the concrete particularity of the film’s self-acknowledged qualities of natural light (Hong’s long-standing relationship to Rohmer again becomes clear), along side the sleepy, dreamlike impressions of day that is unfolding after far too little sleep.”
VIDEO
For the National Post, Calum Marsh, who’d been trying for years to score an interview with Hong, has finally got one: “It’s obvious from his answers why he doesn’t do them very often.”
Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.
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