Like you know it all by Hong Sangsoo

Hong Sangsoo is present at the Directors’ Fortnight 2009 with his latest movie, Jal Alyido Motamyunseo (Like you know it all), which shows spontaneous humour and autobiographical inspiration. The film is divided in two portions which correspond to two trips of the protagonist, a middle-aged Korean director who travels to a film festival as a jury and then to an island to give a lecture. While the first half is hilarious and strongly structured, the second half loses the shape and the direction that the movie was pointing towards. This tends to happen in Hong’s movies, although in his best works he manages to keep the attention of the audience despite the change in the story.

In this film however, even if the first part has a strong content of self-mockery and funny criticism of the filmmaking career, the second part gets lost in redundant dialogues and situations that fail to add any more interest to the new story. Although Hong respects his personal style (including some elements he had used in his last movies, such as the brusque zoom-ins and the voiceover), the fragmented narrative does not help to consider it as a completed work, leaving us curious about what would have happened if the first half had developed more of its potential.

Natalia Ames