Woman Is the Future of Man

So, this is Sang-soo's film in which he attempts to critique toxic masculinity? If so, then he does not succeed. It's just an all-round unpleasant viewing experience, which in and off itself is not a problem, but there has to be a pay-off beyond mere gratuity, which is not really the case here. It's almost as if the way Sang-soo constructs the film reaffirms, as oppose to problematises, that which he is seemingly trying to question (i.e., the film itself is masculinity in toxic form).

One of the few Hong Sang-soo films left unexplored to me, and was a tragi-comic delight from beginning to end. Just when you feel a belly laugh coming on Sang-soo counters it with an aching punch to the gut.

Its minimalism is disarming, as soft as the falling snow. Surprising then, each lash of the tongue, and disquieting when made apparent the cumulative misery and destruction these characters wreak upon themselves and each other.

I appreciate the minimalism and unraveled storytelling, but the acting felt a little stiff, the story a bit dull, and the characters weren't all that like-able or fleshed out. Still, it has an artistic appeal to it, even if it demands an acquired taste.

"The constantly falling snow beautifully heightens the memory deprivation of the already temporally challenged mise-en-scène, but the narrative remains hungry for action." - Ed Gonzalez

This has a little bit more of an edge than most of the recent Sang-soo movies I watched. I liked it a lot.

Considerably darker and more cynical than what I'm used to from Hong. His great skill as a filmmaker, as it seems to me, is a light and somewhat comic touch in the midst of relational difficulties. Here, his two leads are sullen, weak, and destructive, qualities that are just too one-dimensional to be all that interesting.

Very structured and also Rohmer-esque, but w/ sharper ironic gestures (w/ extreme cringe) and -uglier-: all the men are openly craven, impotent, self-involved, oversensitive idiot brutes, all the women are contently compliant w/ it (little "you men are all the same!!" speeches turn out to be empty-- "May I suck you off, Sir?") and just as bad. À la NYMPHOMANIAC, HSs won't even leave us w/ the one outsider (the student who seems to rebuke the professor is apparently revealed as a stalker creep).