Oki’s Movie by Hong Sang-Soo
Oki’s Movie is a South Korean movie written and directed by Hong Sang-Soo, released by Jeonwonsa Films locally in South Korea on September 16, 2010. It is the eleventh movie made by Hong Sang-Soo. It was the second movie directed by Hong Sang-Soo to be released in 2010, the first being Hahaha (which won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival [1]). 36,466 tickets were sold during the theatrical run of Oki’s Movie between September 16, 2010 and January 9, 2011 [2], considerably less than the highest-grossing South Korean film of 2010 (The Man from Nowhere—which Wikipedia describes as “the story of a vengeful man who embarks on a murderous rampage when the only person that seems to understand him is taken from him”—with 6,228,300 admissions and a net profit of 47.1 billion Won [3] was the highest-grossing movie in South Korea in 2010).
It is in four parts: titled, “A Day for Incantation,” “King of Kisses,” “After the Snowstorm,” and, “Oki’s Movie,” respectively. Each part is described in detail here. The movie has no plot, I think [4]. There are pieces of narrative within it [5] but as a whole it is just a collection of scenes presented in a sometimes-linear manner. I first watched this movie while sitting nude in a bathtub filled mostly with water that was hot enough to make me feel faint.
I became aware of Hong Sang-Soo as someone who interests me by reading about him on the internet [6], at work in the middle of the night [7], after having watched—and enjoyed a lot—his second movie, The Power of Kangwon Province [8], sometime during the winter of 2010-11. I read about the movie on Wikipedia and watched it maybe three or four times in the two or three weeks after I learned about its existence. I watched all of Hong Sang-Soo’s other movies [9] over the next two years or so, becoming increasingly interested and maybe, to some degree, “passively obsessed” with his movies, finding them to be near-perfect expressions of something or many things that I have felt but never been able to express for myself. Oki’s Movie, The Power of Kangwon Province, and Woman on the Beach have all had a noticeable effect on me, in terms of how I think and behave [10], and have provided comfort to me—sometimes, when feeling overwhelmed by “life”—by performing the role of “something I can watch and see not only an aesthetically pleasing image but the thoughts, ideas, and experiences of another person [11] expressed quite plainly and beautifully and honestly.”
After watching Oki’s Movie for the first time I felt affected and quiet in a way that was not uncommon for me to feel after watching one of Hong Sang-Soo’s movies; but sitting there, in a bathtub, with strength sapped by hot water, the quietly affective feeling felt amplified. I stayed awake most of the night, I think, looking at things on the internet about Hong Sang-Soo that I had already read, scanning them for information about Oki’s Movie.
I then watched the movie, or sometimes just specific scenes or segments of it, many times over the next few months, strategically—using the emotions expressed in the movie as a complement to my own: leading, encouraging, sustaining, or changing my own constantly fluctuating emotional state with an aesthetic stimulant, like how a sound editor would apply music to a scene. I formed a connection with the movie, which, having thought about a lot, I think I can pinpoint to one line of dialogue [12].