You do wonder as you watch it if Scorsese's remarks haven't been applied to the wrong film. Compared to Hong's more accessible if not necessarily more inviting Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors and Turning Gate, Woman Is the Future of Man seems a dud, a dead battery, as two burned out ex-college pals Yoo Jitae's art professor and Kim Taewoo's going-nowhere filmmaker get drunk and retrace their failed relationships with the same woman, and art student turned bar girl (Sung Hyunah, a former miss South Korea).
The DVD extra containing footage of the shoot shows Hong to be an up-close-and-personal filmmaker, leaning almost into the frame with the actors as they occupy mainly cramped interior spaces. Alert to the tensions of each moment and situation, he incorporates them into an ever-evolving script. But this implies that there's more happening, at least internally, than the film actually projects. Hong says he borrowed the title from a poem by Louis Aragon. More useful to an understanding of the film is a remark by Hong's cinematographer, Kim Hyunghoo, who draws a parallel between the film and the paintings of Cezanne. As an exercise in proto-cubism, with facets of the same reality overlapping, interrupting and complementing one another, it at least takes on theoretical, structural meaning.
Otherwise, it mostly seems a screenful of ashes. The characters, dim and drunk, stagger on as the bonhomie quickly exhausts itself after they've swallowed enough raw squid and rice wine in a noodle house where they take turns failing to impress a young waitress. Things don't pick up after they locate the flat of the woman they once both chased in turn, with the pompous art prof moving in on her after the filmmaker departed for what turned out to be an unsuccessful expedition to America, leaving her behind. Considering how each treated her then with little improvement in the interim it's a wonder she's as receptive to them when they show up now, years later. But although she was raped by another man in the interim, she is receptive, not leery. Hospitality is carried to excruciating lengths, gender stereotypes pile up, and what could have been a long night's journey into day becomes a long night's journey into more benightedness.
They ask a lot of her, including sex and absolution, giving nothing in return. Their self-absorption, comic up to a point, renders them shallow and dismissible in a film that's cold and flat. The film does not lack for snow universal symbol of death. As the drunken men zombie through their non-lives, you don't wonder that they can't light her fire. They can't light their own. It's a challenge to make a film about people who are adrift, not that 20th and now 21st century art has exactly backed away from trying. Sometimes it works, this focus on what people do when they don't know what to do. But if Hong is fleshing out a metaphorical echo of Korean isolation and alienation beneath a surface preoccupation with sex (one of the two insists it's the Korean national pastime), it doesn't emerge with anything remotely resembling clarity, force or resonanace.
Hong's gamble here is a bold one abandon anything remotely resembling narrative or temporal progression. But not every gamble is a winning one. This one, with its fractured structure mirroring the fractured lives of its lost protagonists, is of interest only as an exercise in mimicking the workings and vagaries of memory. But because we're never sure of what internal drives are in play, apart from a sour mix of schadenfreude and residual competitiveness in the former friends, the sex scenes, and would-be sex scenes, with the woman seeming doomed to victimization, seem aimless. So does this film. Although no Hou Hsiao-hsien or Antonioni, Hong clearly is Korea's master of the emotional and spiritual disconnect. In this case, though, you doubt that there ever was much of a connection between these characters, even in their barely shared youth. Entropy, which is what Woman Is the Future of Man traffics in, is more than a prelude to death. It can be numbingly boring.
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by Jay Carr
