(4.5/5)Someday I’m going to see a South Korean film that isn’t good. That day hasn’t come yet, and it certainly doesn’t come with HaHaHa, a superbly crafted and warmly engaging drama from director Hong Sang-soo, which happened to win the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this year. A pair of friends meet for drinks and take the opportunity to reminisce about a city they both spent time at recently, taking turns sharing memories. However, the two men, Moon-kyeong and Joong-sik, don’t realize that they had been frequenting the same places and interacting with the same people. This premise provides an intricate structure upon which Hong interweaves the stories of five or six people as they move in and out of each others’ lives.
At first, these connections seem incidental – Joong-sik and his poet friend eat at a noodle shop that we know is owned by Moon-kyeong’s mother. Moon-kyeong meets a woman who we later learn is dating the poet (who appears in nearly all of Joong-sik’s memories). This woman, Seong-ok, soon becomes something of the solid thread between the two set of stories, as Moon-kyeong begins falling in love with her even while she continues to see the poet in Joong-sik’s memories. Sometimes the stories get quite close together, as when Moon-kyeong talks with his mother in the kitchen while Joong-sik is passed out drunk in the front room (there is a LOT of drinking in the movie, which got incredibly amusing at times). But throughout most of the movie, they don’t realize what we know all along – that their lives in this town and the stories they are telling are inextricably intertwined.
There’s not a whole lot of forward momentum in the film – it doesn’t really build to a giant climax or reveal – but in its moments, its little character interactions, its gently humorous dialogue, it has an incredible amount of warmth and charm. I could’ve just sat and watched this for a lot longer than the film’s running time and watched umpteen more sets of memories from these two. There’s such a deep sense of humanity, of joy, of sadness, of life itself in the film that I didn’t want to let it go. The narrators promise to tell only good stories, pleasant memories, but as we see their memories unfold, it’s clear that there’s more than what they’re explicitly telling each other, and indeed, the camera learns more than what either narrator would know (conversations between Seong-ok and the poet, for example). That may seem inconsistent with the conceit of the film, but it doesn’t feel out of place – it merely feels like the filmmaker stepping in and subtly showing that what we see and what we tell is not the whole story – there’s a very subdued but effective theme running throughout that there’s a difference between what others tell you and actually seeing things for yourself. A dream tells Moon-kyeong to “only see the good things in life,” which is largely what the film shows (making it very pleasant and enjoyable to watch), but there are definitely elements of things aren’t good or pleasant that deepen and complicate the film wonderfully.
Despite the more serious things that happen, the overall tone of HaHaHa matches its title – Hong Sang-soo handles things with a light and humorous touch, making the film pleasant to watch despite the somewhat meandering nature of the story. I also really enjoyed the stylistic touch of having the present day scenes (Moon-kyeong and Joong-sik sharing memories) in black and white stills with voice-over, reserving motion and full color for the memories. It’s both opposite of what you’d expect in terms of normal stylistic choices to depict past and present, and thematically relevant by way of foregrounding and highlighting the memories, making them more real in a way than the framing present-day period. HaHaHa is easily one of my favorite films of the festival, and I’m really disappointed I couldn’t work the scheduling out to see Hong’s other film here, Oki’s Movie, but I definitely plan to delve further into his filmography.
Writer/Director: Hong Sang-soo
Starring: Kim Sang-kyung, Yu Jun-Sang, Moon So-ri
Country: South Korea
Running Time: 115 min.
i love Hong Sang-Soo, and was kind of surprised that the TIFF Folks didn’t program him at this years festival (he has been kind of an annual ritual for the past decade or so!). I can’t wait to check this out, although I fear it is quite hard to get his films on this side of the Pond. Maybe English Subs on a Korean release?
I recommend, Women on the Beach, Tale of Cinema, Woman Is the Future of Man and Like You Think You Know it All.
I haven’t seen A Woman Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors or On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate mainly because I didn’t discover HSS until the festival circuit in the early 2000s….But I’m sure they are very good, as those are the two films that got the director a lot of notice on the international stage…
Didn’t they have Oki’s Movie at TIFF? I know I remember reading about that one before – they had HaHaHa and Oki’s Movie programmed back to back here, and apparently they’re kind of companion pieces, but I shoved off to see Pulsar instead.
I hadn’t heard of Hong Sang-Soo before, but if everything he does is half as good as this, I’m going to be doing the legwork to seek more out. If you want a laugh, go read the lone review on IMDb of this film. I’m pretty sure the reviewer is only familiar with Oldboy-style Korean films and was mightily disappointed there was no hammer fight in here.
If they did, then somehow I missed it. I wasn’t even aware of that film until I saw it in your review. I was aware of HaHaHa, and was surprised that it wasn’t programmed…
One thing to get used to in the cinema of HSS is that there will be a lot of good looking young folks doing a lot of drinking, and making some pretty big fools of themselves socially.
“One thing to get used to in the cinema of HSS is that there will be a lot of good looking young folks doing a lot of drinking, and making some pretty big fools of themselves socially.”
Oh, that was definitely the case here. There was one really nice moment with the drinking thing where a girl asked Joong-sik to take her out for drinks in one memory, but they don’t ever quite make it, but then in Moon-kyeong’s next memory, he pours her a drink. There are a lot of little nuances like that as the memories inform each other in ways the characters aren’t aware of.
I saw this at Cannes and struggled to get into it as much as you. It’s subtle offbeat style grew on me as the film went on, but I thought it dragged on too long and I lost interest by the end. It didn’t help that it was the last film of the day bang in the middle of the festival. Maybe if I felt a little more awake I could have got more from it. His style is clearly an acquired taste though.
Once you acquire the taste however, each one of these is full of delights… This has been my experience, and I more or less had the same reaction when I first saw, A Tale of Cinema.
I think it helped me that the film shares a lot of the qualities that I enjoy about low-key French dramas – there seems to be an affinity there, and I’ve noticed it with a few other Korean dramas, too. Same goes for Wong Kar-wai, so maybe I’m just finding specific Asian directors who speak my cinematic language, the way a lot of French directors do.
I love a lot of low key films, but if I’m not in the right mood I can struggle to get into them – maybe there’s a bit of ADD in me
I’ve been working my way through some of the Japanese masters recently, taking in some Ozu and Mizoguchi – those guys make unbelievably subtle films that can cause fidgeting around the two-third mark, but they become devastating by the end and the artistry is astounding. I think maybe it was the end of Hahaha that lost me, it felt quite unsatisfying and it’s style is so lo-fi the film is difficult to bask in if you know what I mean. Perhaps some further viewing is required.
I love Wong Kar-Wai though, the cinematography in his films helps them stay captivating even if the content ever meanders. God bless Christopher Doyle