Hong Sang-soo on the male condition. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

TWO MASTERS at this year’s Festival have travelled over to Paris, and both have delivered exquisite pieces of filmmaking. The first, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon has already been celebrated on Lumière (and will be in the future). The second, by Korean Hong Sang-soo is also truly wonderful, a sharp, hilarious take on relationships and loneliness – Paris captured through a brilliant artist’s eyes. And I’m not talking about Hong’s irredeemable protagonist. Hong has been (rather unfairly) called the Henry Miller of Korean cinema, however, ironically, Hong goes to Paris and loses all interest in sex (or at least, his character can’t get any). This is classic stuff, made by one of Korea’s premier auteurs.

Hong’s films are about the intimate, about personal relationships, and about male/female relations. He looks at social niceties and accepted behaviour and how they often get in the way of baser instincts. Night and Day looks at Sung-nam, a painter who flees Seoul for Paris after having shared a joint with foreign exchange students. He ends up sharing a room with ten others in a Parisian apartment, and finds himself having relationships with varying degrees of disastrousness with three women in Paris, and talking to his wife back in Seoul. Hong’s usual ménage-à-trois is greatly expanded.

Hong has been compared to French “comedy of manners” specialist Eric Rohmer, however, the film bears a lot of similarities to Jean Eustache’s masterpiece La Maman et la Putain. Both Eustache’s eventual suicide note and Hong’s film have a sly critique of male/female relations and the ensuing power relations. Both films feature a cast of self-obsessed masochists who sit around in cafés feeling sorry for themselves. (The ending bears a strong similarity too). And like Rohmer as well, the dialogue is the key. However Hong’s film is very, very funny – there’s almost a social awareness that rivals the likes of Gervais and co, though Hong’s humour is so dry you can forget to laugh. The characters seemingly fight never-ending skirmishes in the constantly shifting terrain of their relationships – often power can be lost or won by a line of dialogue, a cut, or a look.

Hong films his actors in extremely long takes as frequently entire scenes last the one, static shot. His camera exists almost for functional purposes only – it’s a well-focused shot that captures only what it needs to capture (Hong’s occasional forays into the bizarre excepted). His actors respond beautifully – Kim Young-ho as Sung-nam is wonderfully frazzled, frightening, lovable, pathetic and hopeless all at once. A scene where he starts quoting the Bible to get out of sleeping with an ex-girlfriend he doesn’t really remember, was an instant classic. Hong uses a motif from Beethoven’s 7th throughout – but occasionally undercuts the beauty of the piece with his love of eccentricity. Water running down a drain accompanied by Beethoven suddenly hits a pile of dog shit. This is a sharp film, a deceptively “small” masterpiece that is much more complex than it looks.