Bmore: Woman is the Future of Man
onetet
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This is the next film in the FREE film series I program and host for the BMA... if you don't want to read the entire press release, it's a South Korean dark comedy from 2004.South Korean cinema has exploded with creativity over the past decade, and the BMA's Free First Thursdays Film Series gives you an opportunity to check out one of the most audacious, artful, and darkly comic voices of the Korean New Wave with its FREE 35mm screening of Hong Sang-soo's Woman Is the Future of Man (2004).The BMA screening takes place Thursday, August 2nd at 8 pm and is FREE for everyone.Many of us have thrilled at Korean cinematic exposts such as Oldboy (Park Chan-wook) and The Host (Bong Joon-ho) in recent years. Hong Sang-soo's work explores other corners of the South Korean cultural renaissance, with cerebral and biting work that has earned him comparisons to directors as diverse as Woody Allen and Michelangelo Antonioni.Indeed, his Turning Gate was my first exposure to Hong Sang-soo's work, billed at a Toronto Film Festival screening as the work of the "South Korean Woody Allen." The comparison isn't totally off base: most of Hong Sang-soo's work concerns itself with the tangled romantic lives of urban professionals, and his neurotic, chauvanistic, and self-absorbed main characters (often male film directors!) are often mistakeningly assumed to reflect the director's world view.But the comparison only goes so far. While Woman Is the Future of Man is rich with humor, its realism far surpasses Allen's -- and its laughs generally don't come from punchlines, but rather from wince-worthy observations about how we mistreat the people we love. There's also a sense of excitement about the possibilities of cinema in Hong Sang-soo's work which goes beyond Allen's.Some critics have described Woman Is the Future of Man -- a love triangle between a filmmaker, an art professor, and a bohemian waitress -- as a post-modern riff on Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim. And while this film is perhaps not as gentle as much of Truffaut's work, it does channel some of the energy of the French New Wave, in that it signals the arrival of an exciting new master director on the international film scene.Don't miss this exceptional film!
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Honor the death of Antonioni by watching the work of an up-and-coming filmmaker who's been compared to him. Or something like that.