RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN
Boy meets girl – twice – in MIFF regular Hong Sang-soo's 17th feature film.
A filmmaker, Ham Cheon-soo (Jung Jae-young of Hong's Our Sunhi, MIFF 2013), is visiting Suwon, south of Seoul, for a small festival screening of his film. While taking time to sightsee, he meets local girl Yoon Hee-jeong, an aspiring painter. The two get to know each other over coffee, then sushi, then too much soju, visiting Hee-jeong's studio along the way and going to a party together.
The film starts over and the interaction plays out again, but this time with subtle differences in attitude and language, framing and camerawork, leading to a distinctly different conclusion.
Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival (where Jung Jae-young also picked up the Best Actor award), Right Now, Wrong Then is a charming and bittersweet look at miscommunications between men and women and how these can steer relationships in completely different directions.
"Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience." – The New Yorker