Part 1：
Although this movie was made in 2011, the director intended to shoot it in black and white, along with the sudden and direct zoom-in sometimes making it look like an old movie. Additionally, the zoom-in seems to remind the audience that “we are shooting a movie here and what you are seeing is presented deliberately”.
The Day He Arrives is similar as Café Lumiere to some degree, which does not have a clear storyline and focuses on the depiction of relationships and complex emotions. Moreover, both these two movies feature repetitive scenes of bars, meals, drinking, as well as stationary camera and long takes. However, unlike the silence in Café Lumiere, dialogues and monologue of the leading character are the major part of this film.
The movie satirizes men like Seong-jun by depicting his relationship with other people, especially with women. What really interesting and sarcastic is the comparison between how he acts in front of his lovers as well as his female fans and how he acts in front of other people, like those film students and his old partners. In front of the females, he likes to show off knowledge by saying something abstract. He seems confident and powerful in the relationship with women as he is in charge of their interactions and he always pretends to be the role of a life mentor of those women. However, he is kind of a failure in reality. He made four films before he turned to be a professor, which earned him no fame or money. Not many people have watched his films, even the students of film studies have never heard of him or his films (though they claim they watched them, but I believe they are lying out of polite given their expressions). For example, after he had sex with women, he refused to leave his contact information and asked them not to contact him or see him again in the future. However, when he gets along with men, he tends to act in an obsequious way. He called Young-ho for many times and asked him to call him back. At the end of the movie, he leaves his phone number to an unfamiliar man willingly and he suggested one man he used to know to have a drink with him while the man just ignored his invitation intentionally.
The viewpoints about randomness and coincidence in the movie are also very interesting. When something happens repeatedly to us, we may think it is written or there must be some reasons behind it. However, the movie shows that it just happens randomly and there is no certain explanation for it. For example, Seong-jun comes across an actress for many times, which can be a romantic beginning of a cheesy love story, while nothing really happens between Seong-jun and this actress in the movie. Seong-jun just wants to have sex with women instead of building relationships, therefore, in that sense, the so-called “coincidence” acting as an important role in love movies is not needed here. He says that “I love you”, “I cannot live without you” or “I will give you a happy life” to women on the bed but after the sex, he can leave them without any reluctance and without any willingness for further contact.
Part 2：
I’ll talk about the portrayals of male characters in Hong sang soo’s movies. Hong sang soo has made around 20 films and what is interesting is that the leading male characters in these movies are pretty similar from many aspects. We will discuss their shared features and how they are presented in the day he arrives.
Before talking about the male characters in movies, I would like to introduce Hong sang soo very briefly. Hong is a famous korean film director and screenwriter, as well as a professor at Konkuk University. He has experience of being a student of arts both in Korea and U.S.
Outside of his movies, he was known for being reported to have an extramarital affair with an famous korean actress, who had appeared in hong’s movies and much younger than him. His wife publicly complained that hong abandoned her and their daughters.
The reason I mentioned Hong’s career and personal life is because when we look through the male characters created by hong, we can find many similarities between Hong and his characters. We assume that maybe to some degree, all of them are acting as projections of Hong or the class represented by him.
Now let’s back to our topic, the male characters in hong’s movies. These characters share lots of common traits, the most observable one is the similar occupation or social identity. Most of them are doing jobs regarding films or arts. Here is a brief summary of the occupation of male leads in hong’s movies. They are writers, painters, professors, and mostly are film directors. The features of this kind of males are that they are usually publicly regarded as intellectuals or key opinion leader in a society. Also, they are admired by other people, especially females. In the day he arrives, all the women who appeared in this movie express their appreciation for Seong-jun or his films. In particular, the female student and the bar owner fell in love with him, and the female professor Bo-ran showed strong curiosity and interest in Seong-jun.
However, what hond is doing in his films is unlike traditional films, which depict male intellectuals as heroic pioneers of emancipation or persecuted dissidents under social reforms and political movements. Hong is aimed to make the disenchantment of intellectuals. Disenchantment means the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society in social sciences. I borrow this term here. It means that Hong tries to reveal the unseen side of intellectuals in previous movies, make them not unreachable or even respectable anymore and break people’s perfect illusions about intellectuals.
Firstly, those intellectuals in Hong’s movies are mostly socially unrecognized. On the one hand, their career paths are not successful as expected. For example, Seong-jun made four films before he left seoul and became a professors in a county, but these films earned him no fame or money. Even the students of film studies cannot recognize him and did not watch his films. Though some of them say they did, but I guess it is out of polite based on their awkward expressions. On the other side, unlike women, the other men in the film tends to have kind of negative views about Seong-jun. Young-ho, his close friend, said seong-jun’s piano performance is embarrassing. Kyung-jin, the ex-actor, claimed that seong-jun is selfish, untrustworthy and cares for money more than friendship.
Secondly, hong achieves the disenchantment by focusing on the intellectuals daily life and exposing how they deal with relationships and lust instead of putting them in social movements. The intellectuals in movies behave indifferently about political or social issues. In the loads of dialogues in this movie, the males mainly talk about women, relationships, and personal conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, ironically, those intellectuals are usually involved in unethical relationships which are not highly accepted by the society like Hong himself. They always have sex impulsively with strangers after drinking alcohol. Additionally, the professors in hong’s movies always have sexual relationships with their female students, not only in the day he arrives, but also lost in the mountains, oki’s movie and our sunhi, while seong-jun actually knows clearly that this kind of relationship is not appropriate.
Another thing differentiates the intellectuals in hong’s movies from traditional heroic ones is that they look coward and hypocritical. For example, seong-jun packages himself by abstract philosophy viewpoints, psychological tricks and clumsy performance in front of women to maintain his identity as an intellectual. However, the alcohol can demolish this package and make him an ordinary man longing for sex.
By looking through these shared features of male characters in hong’s movies, I think the disenchantment of intellectuals make the characters look more realistic and make audience more connected with them.
Hong makes fun of them in his movies, but the movies also convey an idea that these attributes are borned with men.
Hong’s sarcastic and pathetic presentation of male intellectuals can be considered as a self-mocking because those intellectuals are exactly projections of him or the class he represents.
高清
