All right, yes, Kim Min-hee is singing somewhere other than a beach — sort of a coastal-looking area, still — and during daytime in the first preview for Hong Sang-soo‘s latest film, but sometimes a headline just sort of writes itself and you need to let that take over. (Add the fact that all beach-set still images were shot during the daytime, some with multiple people in the frame, and I can’t even fathom what’s going on here.) Not that it’d likely tell you much more about On the Beach at Night Alone, which premieres at Berlinale next month, is currently without any available synopsis, and from which we only have 90 seconds of its lead actress singing.
But they’re some good seconds — and all the more noteworthy when Hong’s work has wound up at an interesting point over the last few years, moving as it has from his most structurally inventive (Hill of Freedom) to his most accessible (Right Now, Wrong Then) to perhaps his cruelest (Yourself and Yours). Where this lands — be that within any of those spaces, or nowhere near them — remains to be seen. If the last 18-or-so features are a proper precedent, my guess is that Beach proves excellent all the same.
Watch below:
