The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 8-14
Woman on the Beach (2006)
Directed by Hong Sang-soo
Perhaps the reason why so many of Hong’s films go unseen (besides their limited releases) is that they’re virtually impossible to sell on the basis of plot alone. Take his seventh feature. Its love-triangle premise is simple but unexciting: a movie director fighting writer’s block wheedles a colleague into taking a trip to the beach and ends up seducing his companion’s girlfriend. But watch and listen closely and you’ll recognize Hong’s own hangups—about petty one-upmanship, sexual inadequacy, the particular cruelty of abandoning a dog on the side of the road—as your own. His films hold a mirror to the parts of you you’d rather not see. You can hardly look away, nor can you stop laughing. Still, there is real joy in these films. Lauren Ro (June 10, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Hong retrospective)