Vague Visages’ In Our Day review contains minor spoilers. Hong Sang-soo’s 2023 movie features Gi Ju-bong, Kim Min-hee and Song Seon-mi. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Hong Sang-soo has spent the last few years stripping down his style and productions to the point where he’s free to make a movie mostly out of focus, such as In Water (2023). And while that film feels like a conclusion of sorts to this arc, the trajectory isn’t so neat. In fact, Hong almost seems more uncertain and fragmentary, as if he’s making two films a year because it allows him to move in multiple different directions at once. The Novelist’s Film (2022) is a beautiful celebration of art and love (and a conclusion to a different arc), while In Front of Your Face (2021) is searing and death-obsessed, and Walk Up (2011) is a throwback to the kind of films Hong made a decade ago. 

In Our Day falls into a similar vein, as it’s less a reinvention than a consolidation by returning to old ground with new ideas. It’s a lot looser than, say, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) but has a similar structure to it. The majority of the films Hong made before the late 2010s, in which two seemingly similar events are repeated (a first date or a single day), reveal subtle but meaningful differences. During In Our Day, two seemingly dissimilar events reveal meaningful similarities. 

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The two protagonists of In Our Day have no material connection to one another and don’t seem to have much in common. Sang-won (Kim Min-hee) is an actress who has returned to Korea somewhat dejected, lingering in the space between one stage of her life and the next at the house of a close friend (Song Sun-mi), whereas Hong Ui-ju (Ki Joo-bong) is a poet not quite at the end of his life who just want to live, according to a title card, “peaceful [and] free of pain.” But in the echoes across their stories, across this single day, the protagonists almost seem to be talking to one another, or trying to, by reaching across some strange distance to someone they don’t even know. It’s not dissimilar to connections between movie characters and the audience: feelings can resonate — they can ring in a similar tone –but they can never touch.

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One thing In Our Day’s protagonists do have in common, though, is that both meet with younger people who admire and want something from them. Sang-won’s cousin, Ji-soo (Park Mi-so), seeks advice on how to become an actress (a goal she seems to have worked little towards alone), and two young fans of Ui-ju — Ki-joo (Kim Seung-yun) and Jae-won (Ha Seong-guk) — make a film about him so that he will share some of his sagely wisdom on life, love and the universe. The fans even bring their elders offerings, as if they are something to pray to. Ji-soo comes with soap and Jae-won with cigarettes and alcohol, oblivious to the fact that Ui-ju quit both because of his weak heart.

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Generational divide is a fairly new theme in Hong’s work. It is the subject of the somewhat slim Introduction (2021) and has been gestured towards a few times before and since, but it’s at its most developed in the director’s latest film. There is something interesting in the way these young people at once venerate and negate their elders, expecting them to be somehow able to pass on that which can only be gained through experience, and thinking that it’s theirs to take. If In Our Day feels exploratory, then this familiar film is a comfortable space in which to explore. Hong has always developed ideas across different movies, and that’s only a problem if one is attached to the idea that every film must stand entirely on its own.  

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Hong’s films are themselves the process through which he figures something out, rather than the result. And this process is often a subject in and of itself, which is why so many of the filmmaker’s protagonists are directors and artists. Famously, Hong writes scenes the morning they are shot to keep them spontaneous (though not improvisations) and to bring his films closer to the world that he’s trying to capture. The director strips excess away because, as Ui-ju says during In Our Day, “maintaining a clear vision might be the hardest thing in the world.

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Hong reaches towards an inner peace, an acceptance of life as it is, that can only be achieved through a kind of self-negation, where biases and filters are transparent. Many of the filmmaker’s characters search for the same thing in their muddled ways, even if they can’t quite explain it. And even when they can, it’s not so easy to live up to. Lee Hye-young’s character in In Front of your Face (2021) repeats mantras similar to Ui-ju, albeit in the face of a world that’s harshly colored and pointlessly cruel. The searching seems to come more naturally in In Our Day, which is shot in the soft, pretty colors of the early morning and lingers in the foggy feeling of having just woken up — those brief moments where the world is there but not yet burdened by words or ideas. 

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But Hong’s character searching doesn’t remain quite as idyllic throughout In Our Day, evidenced by early scenes of Sang-won finding the gentle but meaningful beauty of meeting a new cat, a sequence expanded and repeated in a large mirror covering one of the walls of her friend’s small apartment. The moment doesn’t build to some great drama — bitter arguments have been slowly fading from Hong’s films — but without the surface dust of melodrama, the deeper rooted conflicts can reveal themselves. Sang-won somewhat cruelly bristles at her cousin’s sweet neediness and is revealed by the title cards — which consistently complicate what’s on screen in direct and allusive way — to feel “unburdened [and] helpless.” And Ui-ju’s ideal of meditative acceptance starts to feel like a delusion — at first in comic ways (he’s passive in the sense that he could take a shower more often) and then in tragic ones (Ui-ju accepts his daughter’s estrangement and gives up trying to reconnect with her).

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This ethos seems in conflict with being an artist, because art is, in large part, born from a drive to connect. Why wouldn’t Ui-ju keep his poetry to himself? This idea is largely irrelevant to some essence of the world that most people have no sense of — it isn’t the world they live in. If this seems like a self-critique for Hong, it is, but that doesn’t mean he dismisses the project as a whole. Since the director started to collaborate (and fall in love) with Kim Min-hee, his films have become less scathing, less dramatic and more forgiving — Hong is comfortable to let contradictions lay.

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Neither of In Our Day’s lead characters get much of an ending. Incompleteness is essential to Hong’s art, as he always points towards what is off-screen. So much of the conflict and content within the filmmaker’s works exist in the space and friction between disparate parts.

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Ideas continue across films — sometimes developing, sometimes fading and other times simply repeating — but they never conclude. In Our Day shows that even a smaller Hong Sang-soo film, like the smaller moments of life that it portrays, can be just as rich with drama, sadness and beauty as any other, and that every fragment contains so much of the whole. The director’s 2023 movie suggests so much outside of its own limited scope, which is about as close as any film can come to capturing life — it cannot touch, but it can resonate.

Esmé Holden (@esmesayss) is a transgender writer and editor based in Manchester, England. She has written for Cinema Year Zero, Little White Lies and Bright Wall/Dark Room. Esmé is obsessed with Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Bugs Bunny.

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