Amateur Recommendation Hour: The Day He Arrives

Today’s recommendation is a masterclass in subtlety. Quite possibly one of my favorite Korean films I’ve yet seen from a director who has no shortage of quality works in his filmography. An artist who understands that something small that happens a lot, isn't small. And smartly weaves that idea into the fabric of this film.

The Day He Arrives, directed and written by Hong Sang-soo, is a minimalistic, short, but poignant film about the constant reminders of our past in daily life. Be it a place, a person, an event, or anything else that could cause a vivid memory of a previous experience, positive, negative, and everything in between. Artists will sometimes create works that reflect who they want to be rather than who they truly are. 

Sang-Joon is a professor in the film department at a provincial university. He goes to Seoul to meet his senior, Young-Ho, who works as a film critic. Sang-Joon stays in a northern village in Seoul for 3 days. Throughout his time in Seoul he is reminded of bits and pieces of a life and a time he has tried to get away from. As people and places he has long been estranged from, come back to poke and prod at his life, where he is, what he is doing, and only he knows the truth: nothing much worth discussing or bragging about.

The film is presented through a black and white filter, tonally an outstanding choice, consistent with the themes and ideas the work strives to convey. It’s cinematography a mesmerizing mixture of isolating and intimate, distant and confined. These ideas seemingly diametrically opposed, melded brilliantly through its often static and unmoving frames. The dialogue feels so natural and real not only in how it is written by how it is delivered by each actor. The cadence through which we speak in daily life is often an inconsistent tempo full of pauses, mistakes, topic changes and the like. Fully committed to the grounding of its tone and subject matter, it creates a realistic flow of conversation. The kind that we would have between our friends. There’s almost a sense of intrusion through its aforementioned minimalist shot framing, it feels like we’re peeking in on these people’s lives after their work hours have concluded, in a tightly packed bar, in a confined bedroom like we are just slightly removed from the circumstances, knowing full well we’ve had these kinds of experiences or ones like them in our lives ourselves.

The setting does a remarkable job of converging and consolidating this work even further. Even while it’s set in by far the most populous city in Korea, it’s often portrayed in the dead of night, back alleys, streets devoid of life, dingy and dimly lit bars and houses. The sense of personality it creates and the disconnect between the knowledge that Seoul is home to half of the Korean population, a cool 25 million strong, and having it feel so desolate and alien is a very stark contrast. The atmospheric and almost hypnotizing effects of whirling snowfall and gentle breezes almost make parts of the film feel like they take place in some distant snow globe. As our main character trudges along you can feel every step, every action, and the weight of his life to this point.

In fact, to go on somewhat of a tangent if I may, I believe that this film is somewhat mutually intelligible with the single best piece of art I will ever have the fortune of experiencing, the subject of a previous Amateur Recommendation Hour: Cowboy Bebop. 

Two different mediums, animation and live-action film. Vastly different in presentation, Cowboy Bebop is confident, cool, and stylish, whereas The Day He Arrives is muted and minimalist. However with all of these differences they are, to an extent, thematic siblings. That’s not to say that they’re mere copies of each other or anything outlandishly asinine like that. I’m in constant awe of the versatility of storytelling as an art form and how two seemingly unrelated and dissimilar pieces of work can be mutually intelligible with each other. In a broader sense we can also relate this thought process to our own relationships with other people since art is created by us after all. We may have different lifestyles, tastes, and viewpoints but similar experiences and methods of managing those experiences. Art imitates life.

I believe this film is trying to communicate the idea that one of the keys to living a fulfilling and rewarding life is learning how to break our own self-destructive cycles. To acknowledge our own hypocrisy and learn from our mistakes while also accepting how difficult of a task that can be. The aimlessness of life can be partially alleviated if we commit to personal growth and try to be more self-aware. 

It’s truly hard to face the present. Living in the past can be an alluring proposition. It’s safe, special, knowable and unchanging. But in order to experience more of our best, we must take the risks that we are most afraid to take, remembering that in order to create more of those memories we so desperately want to have, that there was a time where we were more willing to take those chances that we were adverse to. The future is undoubtably scary, but we’ve done it before and it has yielded as many positive as it has negative results. Believe in more of those positive moments.

Good art makes you think, it doesn’t tell you what to think (probably about the 8th time I’ve said this in my writing). It’s a gentle suggestion rather than an aggressive mandate. Committing to the ideas that all the best works of art convey so elegantly is a lot less intuitive in our real lives. And that never makes them any less valid. Even if you can’t do it today, tomorrow, this month, maybe even this year. Take those steps. Learn more about yourself, your tolerance levels, and your own abilities. It’s scary to fail and it’s okay to fail, but we must try for the newness and rebirth of our own lives.