Review by Cameron Maitland

One thing that often makes a film a decidedly more unique experience is when a director leaves his home country to film a story abroad. In Night and Day famed Korean director Hong Sang-Soo turns his lens on Koreans in France and comes up with something very different.

The film follows Kim Sung-Nam, a Korean painter who flees to Paris after a series of trumped up marijuana charges makes him paranoid. From there we follow Kim aimlessly meeting up with exes, attempting to seduce young art school students and generally wandering around Paris trying to make a new life. The director deftly makes a film that shows both sensibilities of Korean and French cinema and the mix in visual and acting styles is quite enjoyable.

The strength of the film, beyond the directing, definitely lies in Kim Young-Ho's lead performance. All of the pathetic humour is delivered with ease and the audience never wonders when they should be laughing with the character or at him.

That said, the film's focus on monotony and repetition stomps over the thin line of humour into actual boredom. While it is amusing to see a buffoon caught in a cycle of his own problems after a while the audience themselves gets caught in that same cycle until nobody is having any fun at all. For a film that extends over the two-hour mark Hong Sang-Soo seems to have made his point about three quarters in but just tags on more film for unnecessary emphasis.

Night and Day is by no means a disastrous failure. It is watchable and amusing for the majority of its length but audiences are likely to want to walk out before the final point is made.

Night and Day
Hong Sang-Soo | South Korea | 2008 | 145min