Right Now, Wrong Then

The fine line between love and missed connection is played then replayed in another of Hong’s double takes, this one involving a traveling film director and the young painter he befriends during one long day’s journey into an inevitably soju-tainted evening. All it takes for this new relationship to blossom—or wither—is one opinion given too bluntly, one dinner gone wrong, or one story told differently, as Hong makes clear in this effortlessly light work, reminiscent of Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales. It also boasts Hong’s most memorably disastrous drunk dinner scene, in a career filled with them.