Hahaha 하하하

Story

About to move from Seoul to Canada, film director Jo Mun-gyeong (Kim Sang-gyeong) has a farewell drink with his good friend Bang Jung-shik (Yu Jun-sang), a film critic. During their conversation, they discover they were both recently in the southern coastal town of Tongyeong, so decide to share stories, focusing only on the positive aspects. Mun-gyeong was there to visit his restaurateur mother (Yun Yeo-jeong) and fell for emotionally flighty tour guide Wang Seong-ok (Mun So-ri); she plays hard to get until Mun-gyeong discovers her boyfriend, young poet-cum-former marine Gang Jeong-ho (Kim Gang-woo), has been cheating on her. Jung-shik, married with a child back in Seoul, was there with his flight attendant lover Ahn Yeonju (Ye Ji-weon) and hung out with his friend Jeong-ho, Seong-ok and a fan of Jeong-ho's, Noh Jeong-hwa (Kim Gyu-ri).

Review

Though the two main characters of Hong Sang-soo's (홍상수) latest eating-drinking-and-talking saga are a movie director and a critic, Hahaha (하하하) is neither a satire of film types nor self-reflexive in any way (unlike Hong's previous Like You Know It All 잘 알지도 못하면서). In fact, their occupations are as immaterial as those of the other characters (a cultural tour guide, a poet, a flight attendant), making the film one of the "purest" of Hong's French-style, metaphysical studies of the games people play when sex is at stake.

The set-up is extremely simple (two friends discover they were in a small town at the same time) and its development extremely clever (they both saw many of the same people, but separately). But such is the leanness of Hong's shooting style and editing that the complexity of the overlapping stories never becomes the main focus of interest. As the film cross-cuts between the two men's memories, with their voice-over dialogue leading into the events they are recalling, the viewer actually forgets the fact that these parallel events are taking place at the same time. Such is the effortlessness of Hong's dialogue and the cast's absolute immersion in their emotionally mixed-up characters that the movie flows from one story to another, and from one set of characters to another, with hardly any joins showing. Brief snatches of piano melody provide paragraphs every now and then, as all the characters progress to emotional self-enlightment - as usual in Hong's film, by the scenic route.

For those not attuned to the universe Hong has perfected over his past five movies, Hahaha may seem like more much-ado-about-nothing: endless drinking sessions, emotional U-turns and an awful lot of dialogue. The film does lack the extra emotional depth and ironic sharpness of Like You Know It All, as well as its tight focus on a single main character (male, as usual); and of the several pairings, some are conspicuously more interesting than others. Kim Sang-gyeong (김상경, from Hong's Tale of Cinema 극장전 and Turning Gate 생활의 발견) is superb as the slyly disengenuous director who slowly coaxes Mun So-ri's (문소리) flakey tour guide into bed; their natural on-screen chemistry is never quite matched by fellow male lead Yu Jun-sang (유준상, slightly geeky in glasses) as the film critic who suffers from chronic depression. Compared with Mun's entertainingly spaced-out playing, the other actresses come over as less colourful, though veteran Yun Yeo-jeong (윤여정, The Actresses 액트리스, The Housemaid, 하녀), as the restaurateur mother who can reduce her film-director son to a gibbering child, perks the film up at regular intervals.