Tale of Cinema

Director: Hong Sangsoo

2005 / 89min / DCP

A key work in the development of Hong’s mature style of expressive zooms, failed filmmakers, and bifurcated tales, acutely observed diptych Tale of Cinema begins by depicting an encounter between a young college student and a former flame which leads to a drunken night of sexual fumbling and a suicide pact, then moves to a sort-of “replay” of this scenario featuring a slightly older filmmaker—and the reveal that what we’d watched earlier was a film-within-the-film both re-enacting and predicting the older man’s own missteps. The attempt to reconcile life and art is often a failure in Hong’s films, but here we have one of the greatest successes of his cinema of failure.

Part of Close-Up: Films on Film