Daytime Drinking (Young-Seok Noh, 2009) - Daytime Drinking is a comedy out of South Korea about Hyuk-jin, a young man who, one drunken evening with his buddies, agrees to a spur-of-the-moment trip to a resort up north where another friend runs a spa, only to find, upon waking up after his bus trip the next morning, that none of his friends had followed him. The rest of the film finds our protagonist struggling to get back to Seoul, dependent on the warmth and hospitality of strangers, who, as Korean custom seems to require, all constantly offer him booze as part of the ritual of giving. As soon as he manages to sober up, there comes more booze that he cannot refuse. As a result of all this "hospitality" he can never quite get himself back on track.
This is not exactly the Korean Hangover. The jokes are much more subtle, much more observational, than that broad, dumb American picture. There are long periods of contemplation, and the moments of cruelty have real bite. It reminded me of a good Woody Allen dark comedy of manners. It's detached style is periodically punctuated by highly subjective POV shots, giving it a nice rhythm and character that is unexpected.
The young people who enter the story are all wandering souls, separated from any sense of community. They are cut loose by modern technology, yet set adrift at the same time, left to find their own way in the world. The film investigates the social codes and interactions between strangers. Expectations about the other person are raised that are rarely fulfilled, resulting in confusion and awkward moments. We are reminded in these interactions that each person is experiencing their own individual story. Here alcohol is the perfect solution to such a solitary existence. Any stranger becomes an instant best friend through the lens of drink, which is usually Soju, the national drink of Korea. This is a double-edged sword, however. Like the intoxication, the bond that is formed over drink is instantly dissolved in the light of the following morning.
It's plot can be compared to that of Scorsese's dark masterpiece After Hours. In both films, we identify with the protagonist as he struggles against the labyrinth of life simply to get home. He mostly has the best of intentions in his interactions with would-be saviors, but he can't help but occasionally act in a selfish way himself, as a result of which he is punished beyond all reasonable measure, not by an enemy but by a world conspiring against him. Thus, both films succeed in creating a complex relationship between us and the protagonist. They are selfish, but in such a world, can we blame them? Does that mean they deserve such punishment? In After Hours we get a strong sense of Catholic guilt, and we see a cycle of suffering and redemption. In Daytime Drinking, however, the threat is never quite so extreme, the suffering is muted and temporary, and the redemption never quite comes. Is this a Buddhist take on the same story?
In contrast to the ultraviolent Oldboy series or the fantasy blockbuster The Host, a reserved movie like Daytime Drinking does a fine job of representing a more realistic portrait of modern life in South Korea. Daytime Drinking doesn't quite live up to last year's brilliant Woman on the Beach by Hong Sang-soo, but the two films do share an ironic-skeptical view of life. While two films is hardly a corpus, there's enough similar in theme and style between them that one can begin to draw certain conclusions about a generalized Korean social and personal sensibility. Both show life as a singular, narcissistic endeavor where any new interaction with people is fraught with potential calamity. Both articulate their ideas in a detached, judgmental style. Its as if the filmmakers are saying that the world is a largely meaningless series of jokes and pranks through which some are elevated and some brought to tears, a hierarchy which through circumstance could easily be reversed the following day. Thus, while there is empathy for the suffering, the world's cruelty is not met with great outrage, but rather with contemplation, an ironic chuckle, and a reach for the next bottle of Soju.
Maxwell Anderson is an avid film watcher and blogger. He is also a freelance assistant video editor in New York City. You can contact him through his blog Ecstatic Text: http://ecstatictext.blogspot.com
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