In Our Day (2023, Hong Sang-soo) (Patreon)

39/100

Don't know what Hong's up to slash getting at with this one, and was so little engaged, much less intrigued, that I'm disinclined to exert any energy pondering the question. To his credit, he's still coming up with new structural experiments—In Our Day alternates between two distinct sets of characters, making one direct if implicit connection (a person in each adds hot pepper paste to ramen; "Someone I know always eats it this way," the actor in Section A says; naturally, we assume she refers to the poet in Section B) and tossing in another random point of correspondence (both sections introduce a guitar at roughly the same time). Other than that, there's no obvious reason to juxtapose these two ultra-minimalist narratives, nor does anything of much interest happen in either. Poet's half sees him gradually backslide on his medically-directed effort to quit drinking and smoking, which has some built-in (autobiographical?) poignance, and the "climactic" rock-paper-scissors game is fun to watch. Kim Min-hee's back to headline the other part, which is heavy on the repetitive improv that's driven me nuts in many recent Hongs. (Forgot to count all the "really?"s again.) 

(Yes, I know neither of those women is Kim Min-hee. She's briefly offscreen.)

One woman's beloved cat goes missing, precipitating an atypical emotional crisis...but then gets found almost immediately, at which point that half of the film simply ends. An aspiring filmmaker seems on hand solely as a creative reflex action. It's probably not the case that Hong works significantly harder on the films I like than on the films I don't, but the latter tend to look extremely lazy to me, and In Our Day (a title that doesn't signify nostalgia, as far as I can tell) has the casual ephemerality of something made up on the spot for the hell of it. Thematic links between the two halves will no doubt be explored by devotees more hardcore than myself; I'm afraid that I require more of a reason to care.