Night and Day + On the Beach at Night Alone

6:30pm Night and Day (144m) | 35mm
A successful painter facing pot possession charges flees his sleepy Korean home for the streets of Paris in Hong’s ambling portrait of midlife male discombobulation. A run-in with an old flame, now unhappily married; a series of tearful phone calls to his wife back home; a cautious affair with a young art student; a visit to a church; brief stirrings of lust and affection and homesickness and regret—Hong captures it all with effortless grace and calm matter-of-factness, until a late-film swerve into fantasy caps the whole thing off with a mischievous question mark. An NYFF46 Main Slate selection.

9:15pm On the Beach at Night Alone (101m)
Hong’s movies have always invited autobiographical readings, and his 19th feature is perhaps his most achingly personal film, a steel-nerved, clear-eyed response to the tabloid frenzy that erupted in South Korea over his relationship with actress Kim Minhee. The film begins in Hamburg, where actress Young-hee (played by Kim herself, who won the Best Actress prize at Berlin for this role) is hiding out after the revelation of her affair with a married filmmaker. Back in Korea, a series of encounters shed light on Young-hee’s volatile state, as she slips in and out of melancholic reflection and dreams. Centered on Kim’s astonishingly layered performance, On the Beach at Night Alone is the work of a master mining new emotional depths. An NYFF55 Main Slate selection.