Walk Up Review: Hong Sang-soo’s Synecdoche of Life

There’s an element of the avant-garde in Hong Sang-soo’s films that’s under-acknowledged, though Dennis Lim grasped it in his recent book, Tale of Cinema. In film after film, Hong redefines what’s acceptable as cinematic narrative. In Walk Up, for instance, the conventionally important incidents—and there are a staggering number of them—happen off screen. Meanwhile, the on-screen material is composed of that Hong specialty: long, seemingly aimless drinking and eating and bullshitting sessions between characters, which are emotionally turbocharged by the events that we know preceded an encounter, or sense might be on the way.

Even for those accustomed to Hong’s rhythms, nothing much may appear to be happening in Walk Up at first glance. But as the film’s emotions reverberate, one might be startled to recall that over the course of Walk Up several relationships dissolved, a career hit an impasse, a potentially life-threatening illness arose, and an atheist reached out to God out of desperation. Hong doesn’t code these events melodramatically; respecting his characters’ evasions, he casually establishes lonely, terrifying contexts. With each new film, Hong’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier. Each one also usually utilizes a high-concept hook and a regimented structure, which serve as aides toward mapping out the neurotic murk.

Walk Up’s high concept is that a filmmaker, Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo), goes to visit a friend, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-Young), at the building where she lives, parts of which she rents out. In this building are at least two apartments, a restaurant that operates on two floors, an attic, a cellar, and a terrace. Each section of the building represents a different element of life, and collectively the building evokes the pull between expression, commerce, and responsibility that any artist, whether struggling, successful, or aspiring, must navigate. Byung-soo arrives at this building on a virtual whim and spends a significant portion of his life there, though Hong, characteristically dividing his film into segments and employing ellipses, boils years down to a few afternoons.

This sort of self-conscious premise often defeats filmmakers. It’s easy to imagine an exhibitionist like Alejandro González Iñárritu or a geek narcissist like Charlie Kaufman pounding the implications of this idea into the pavement. By contrast, Hong sets up his conceit in minutes and moves onto the negotiations that are the meat of his drama. Ms. Kim, an interior designer, says she sometimes works in the cellar, but it’s clearly her place of repose. The attic, full of abstract paintings, suggests unbridled creative expression.

The paintings are pivotal, as there are two lapsed painters in the film, both of whom are attempting to embrace more lucrative work. Jeong-su (Park Mi-so), Byung-soo’s estranged daughter, is looking to learn interior design from Ms. Kim, which is the pretense of her and her father’s initial visit. The owner and chef of the restaurant in Ms. Kim’s building, Sunhee (Song Seon-mi), also once attempted to be a painter, which rhymes her with Jeong-su and establishes a neurotic undercurrent to the romance she fosters with Byung-soo. All this texture, and we’ve barely broken the surface, in a film in which supposedly “not much happens.”

On the surface, again characteristic of Hong, are wounded characters exchanging polite pleasantries and passive-aggressive barbs. Ms. Kim has a cold, curt edge that initially telegraphs egotism and more subtly hints at deep pain. You may wonder what exactly is the nature of Byung-soo and Ms. Kim’s relationship, whose origins Hong leaves pointedly hanging. Ms. Kim is intrusive in a manner that’s funny and, with repetition, pathetic.

When Byung-soo moves into the building, Ms. Kim constantly opens his mail, claiming at one point that she thought it was hers, and attempts to walk into his flat unannounced. Her posture—rigid, elegant, and vaguely threatening—indicates her repressed desires, specifically her frustrated sexuality, which parallels the unfulfilled artistic ambitions floating around in the building. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was as prolific as Hong, famously said that he was building a house with his filmography; so is Hong, and in Walk Up he literalizes the metaphor, offering a house as a physical synecdoche of the emotions and challenges involved in the drive to create, whether it’s art, food, or the very domestic realms themselves.

Hong has a disarming way of glorifying and reviling himself at once. Byung-soo is presumably the newest in a long line of the filmmaker’s surrogates, a creator of “talky” movies with a cult following that play well at film festivals. The ego and insularity, as well as the appeal, of this vocation are parodied in one of the funniest exchanges in a recent Hong film, where Byung-soo wonders if continuing to attend retrospectives after retirement is pitiful. Kwon, a veteran of many Hong films, tosses off such questions with a brutal matter-of-factness that’s rife with panic as well as the awareness that’s probably needed to create art to begin with.

Like many artists, though, Byung-soo is out to sea in terms of the day to day—remote, ineffectual, clearly giving the women in his life little of what they need from him. Usually, male filmmakers offer up these details as humble brags, as barely disguised testaments to their middle-aged virility. Films often see filmmakers as self-serving mythmakers. Hong sees them as poignant, hapless people engaged in work that often shares much in common with many less glamorous jobs. Byung-soo is as worn down as any of Walk Up’s dreamers, and Kwon spins his character’s alienation into a weathered statement that’s both fashionable and sad. Little textures of Kwon’s performance keep hitting you, from Byung-soo’s erect, respectful, defensive posture at a meal, to the joy he has in playing the guitar, opening up while he’s unnoticed.

The ellipses in Walk Up do more than abbreviate time. They express how we often compress time in our own minds, obsessively accounting for the big events in our lives while reducing the in-between moments, or the majority of life, to afterthoughts. Such an attitude serves as a brutally efficient way of wasting most our lives, which is perhaps why Hong has devoted so much of his career to exploring this in-between liminal zone. His sleight of hand is resonant: A single cut can move us forward months or maybe years within the chronology of the film, while physicalizing how life just seems to disappear for us, especially those of us in middle age with propensity for keeping our heads in the clouds. When a relationship is collapsing, one might remember the initial flush of promise and the current misery as emotional bookends.

In Walk Up, Hong frames Byung-soo’s various relationships with women in a similar fashion, revealing the beginning or middle of a relationship and then springing forward to the end before we’ve acclimated ourselves. In one case, Hong breaks his strict formal rules, which pivot on unbroken shots of people talking, to utilize a voiceover flashback that reveals Byung-soo’s estrangement from Sunhee. This plunge into Byung-soo’s internal life relieves the tension fostered by the vividly patterned repetitions, the euphemistic dialogue, and the ellipses, broaching pain directly. Yet the film’s bittersweet ending implies that such closure is fleeting, relegating Byung-soo back to the beginning of an elaborate temporal loop that’s implied to be nothing more or less than the entire spectrum of tragedies and trivialities of life.