In “Yourself and Yours,” director Hong Sangsoo’s deadpan romantic comedy featuring a group of South Korean slackers, Minjung (Lee Yooyoung) meets a filmmaker and they go to a neighborhood bar.
“There’s so much we’ll never know,” she tells him. “Don’t try to know everything.”
She’s not being philosophical. She’s enjoying drinking and flirting, and she’s not interested in another man who asks too many questions.
Minjung has just broken up with Youngsoo (Kim Joohyuk), a painter. He was told by a friend that Minjung has been seen drinking with other men at a local bar. It’s not clear if Youngsoo is more upset about her drinking too much or drinking with others, but he focuses on the booze. He tells his friend that five drinks is her limit.
“Yourself and Yours” is sparsely set, taking place in a handful of spots, including a bar, a coffeeshop, a noodle house and Youngsoo's claustrophobically tiny bedroom, with a mattress on the floor and a stack of books for a nightstand. Everyone in the neighborhood seems vaguely acquainted. There’s plenty of gossip, speculation about romantic prospects and a whole lot of drinking. Some variation of “Haven’t I seen you before?” is everyone’s pickup line.
Sangsoo toys with vagueness and miscommunication as the elements that make relationships possible and impossible. When Minjung and Youngsoo have their talk about her drinking, it escalates quickly to indignance on both sides, and the facts of the matter are left in a haze. He says she’s broken a promise. She is insulted that he doesn’t trust her. He curses. She says he’s disrespectful. He demands that she quit drinking or the relationship is over, and in a flash she’s out the door.
Pretension and hypocrisy add to the fun. In a fit of virtue, Yangsoo tells his friend that he’d never date a woman that he wouldn’t marry, and yet, he seems not to trust Minjung at all. But without her, he’s a self-pitying wreck.
Minjung clearly loves alcohol, and she has no problem finding drinking partners. Mixed messages seem almost as irresistible to her. She tells the filmmaker she doesn’t drink alcohol before proposing they go to a bar. She bluntly critiques the attractiveness of her companions and complains that the she’s surrounded by “wolves” and “children.” Minjung seems to want to live a carefree life, but men swarm to her, and it doesn’t always seem flattering. She’s not just noncommittal, though, and the lengths to which she pushes her games of denial risks casting the story in an entirely different light. That’s also not as funny as Sangsoo’s unmasking of the constraints of social taboos, double standards about drinking and people’s desire for simple companionship.
The film is in Korean with English subtitles. It screens virtually via a link on the Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge website (www.zeitgeistnola.org).
Power play
Zeitgeist also screens “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,” and half of the proceeds benefit Patois: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival. Originally released in 2011, the documentary features interviews with leaders of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, including Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and others. The original footage was filmed by a Swedish camera crew and subsequently lost. The tapes were discovered decades later, and “Mixtape” also includes interviews with musicians such as Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli and others.
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June 15, 2020 at 07:00PM
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