You’ll have to excuse me, I’m not at my best,
I been gone for a week, I been drunk since I left;
And these so-called vacations will soon be my death,
I’m so sick from the drink, I need home for a rest.

While the lead character rarely seems to get intoxicated he sure gets his fill of the absurdities of social interaction. Daytime Drinking, a sly, if slightly overlong, South Korean indie plays as if Ricky Gervais wrote a remake of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and envisioned it as loopy road trip. The fact that the film goes nowhere is a strength, not a weakness, as it allows for a string of co-incidences and the various social awkwardness that goes along with meeting strangers twice or three times at different places on the same weekend for no particular reason. Here, performing the duty, as it has for thousands of years, booze (and to a lesser extent, cigarettes) functions as the social lubricant for any encounter. Whether it be a few friends commiserating at a bar, or a random encounter at a bus stop, there is not much to say or do except pour, drain, repeat. This is the cosmic joke on Hyuk-Jin who suffering from being splits-ville with his girlfriend, and with whom we follow over the course of the film. It is a bit of a joke on the audience as well, because The opening 30 minutes or so might be a bit of a challenge for the viewer to acclimatize to first-time filmmaker Young-Seok Noh’s particular worldview.

The story, such that it is, follows Hyuk-Jin as he reluctantly agrees to a trip out of Seoul to the beach with his buddies, ostensibly for him to recuperate from his misery, but really because his friends are all talk when they are drunk. After Hyuk-Jin catches a bus into the small seaside town he finds out that nobody is coming to meet him. The rooming house that they were going to be staying at (one of his friends old college pals) gets all mixed up, and that spirals down to a series of strange encounters for Hyuk-Jin as he struggles to make the best of an alone-vacation and simultaneously get the hell out of dodge. The struggle to go with the flow, yet still attempt to retreat from everything, is as good a metaphor for coming off a breakup as anything else, and it allows for an increasingly outrageous (yet still somehow low-key) encounters to pummel any travelers indomitable spirit. Like Griffin Dunne’s harrowed office clerk in After Hours, Hyuk-Jin is both an everyman audience-surroage and also a bit of an asshole; the world seems fit to punish him for the desire of wanting either his girlfriend back, or to move on, or simply get through any current social contract with a stranger and the karma that accompanies ‘blowing it.’ The backdrop of expansive cold beaches, deserted markets and roadside wilderness (perhaps a bus-stop or small campfire in the foreground to underscore the latter) demonstrate our place in the big wide world and just how easy it is to go from sipping soju with amicable strangers to having no pants on the side of the road on a chill winter morning. The world has fangs. And, it can make for pretty witty deadpan. If you will indulge me, Young-Seio Noh’s filmmaking is sort of a bastard son of Sang-Soo Hong and Jim Jarmusch. No rest for the wicked, no home for a rest, I want to see what he does next.

[Evokative (a charming Canadian micro-distributor) releases Daytime Drinking on DVD with a a booklet featuring a foreword by Grady Hendrix and directors notes. A making-of documentary, deleted scene, and the original soundtrack are included in the discs extra features.]