Walk Up (Hong Sangsoo, 2022) (Patreon)

Walk Up is a slight change-up for Hong, whose structural conceits have generally been somewhat abstract affairs (doubling, mirroring, repetition). Here, Hong uses an architectural motif to organize a set of interconnected stories, and although Walk Up is a perfectly fine title, I wonder whether he'd have called it Three Stories if Nanni Moretti hadn't gotten there first. Like any building, the walk-up in Hong's film consists of empty spaces for the performance of various life rituals. But the space also conditions what can happen, since aspects of interior living that we take for granted -- locked doors, balconies, the cramped stairwells between apartments -- become farcical motifs here.

Once again, Hong has given himself an onscreen avatar, film director Byungsoo (Hong regular Kwan Haehyo), whose diffidence conceals a rather smug self-regard. At this point it seems redundant to praise Hong for creating such unflattering portraits of himself, but it is one of the consistent pleasures of his filmography, an especially potent antidote to the narcissism that drives so much contemporary pop culture. In this case, Byungsoo is a man whose commitment to his craft has come at the expense of his family. In the first section of Walk Up, the director arrives at the building with his daughter Jeonsu (Park Miso), who casually mentions that this is the first time they've seen each other in five years.

The building belongs to Ms. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung, from In Front of Your Face), an interior decorator. She and Byungsoo seem to know each other from awhile back, but not particularly well. Since Jeonsu has an interest in interior design, her father has set up this rather awkward meeting in hopes that Kim will take Jeonsu under her wing. Kim's replies to Jeonsu ("I will do whatever you ask without argument") are met with blank politeness, the first indication that Kim may be a less generous soul than Byungsoo thinks.

Kim lives on the first floor and has a workshop in the basement; the second floor is a struggling restaurant run by Sunhee (Song Sunmi); and the top floor is currently vacant. Kim offers Byungsoo the space for half-price, then for free. She is flirting with him, something to which the director seems oblivious. For her part, Kim will be far less accommodating when Byungsoo is a tenant, living with other women who are quite a bit younger than her.

Over the course of Walk Up, Byungsoo ends up living on the middle floor with Sunhee, and on the top floor with Jiyoung (Cho Yunhee), a realtor who we meet in medias res. Each of the three segments is separated by a temporal ellipsis (signaled by Hong's repeated  non-diegetic guitar theme), and although we don't know how much time has elapsed, the changes in Byongsoo's living / romantic arrangements suggest that it's been years. Or does it? Walk Up establishes fairly early on that the director is not capable of forming lasting relationships, and sees all the women in his life (his daughter included) as extensions of himself. Whether he's telling Sunhee that she should serve more salads at the restaurant, or barely humoring Jiyoung's home remedies for his unspecified illness, Byongsoo seems to find other people a bother.

But then again, he obviously doesn't want to be alone. Walk Up can be difficult to parse from moment to moment, and it often takes a minute to reorient ourselves to the new, presumably later reality. Within each segment, Byongsoo's narrative seems to wander, with casual conversation, half-listening responses, and occasional noodling on the guitar. This aimlessness contrasts sharply with the radical breaks between segments, and these two formal tones seem to mutually inform each other. Hong's artistic stand-in is a man who allows himself to drift from situation to situation quite passively. But when he is dissatisfied, he has no compunction about breaking things off. Walk Up profiles a particular kind of male psyche, one who flatters himself by seeing destruction and creation as coterminous, who walks through life as though everyone around him were just waiting for him to call "cut."