Right Now, Wrong Then, and Praise Addressed to No One

Ham Chun-su arrives in Suwon a day early. He is a film director, a well-known one, in town to present one of his films, and the screening is tomorrow; today he has nothing to do. He wanders. In an old hall he notices a young woman, and he speaks to her, and she knows his name. She is Yoon Hee-jeong, and she paints. They have coffee. By the end of the night they have eaten sushi, drunk a good deal of soju and gone together to a gathering of her friends, and by the next day something between them has been either spoiled or kept.

Which of the two depends on the version. Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then tells this day twice: the same man, the same woman, the same city, very nearly the same rooms. The difference between the tellings can be put in a sentence. The first time, he tells her what she would like to hear. The second time, he tells her what is true.

This essay is about that difference, and it wants to be exact about where it lies. It does not lie in what he wants. In both versions he wants her company, and more than her company. It does not lie in whether he is a good man, because it is the same man. And it does not lie in her, as if one Hee-jeong were wiser than the other. It lies in where his words are addressed. The praise he gives her painting the first time had been said before, to other people, and it would be said again. It fitted her canvas because it would have fitted any canvas. It was addressed to no one. The harder things he says the second time could only have been said to her: about that painting, that day, and about the life he will be going home to. They cost him something to say, and the cost is part of how she can tell they were meant.

Read this way, the film is an argument about being seen, and about where being seen begins: with a sentence that could not have been said to anyone else. It is also an argument about what a true sentence gives the person who hears it. A woman who is told the truth, even clumsily, even by a man she met that day, has something the flattered woman lacks. She knows what kind of day she is in. She can decide what to do with it.

Right Now, Wrong Then was written and directed by Hong Sang-soo, and it was his seventeenth film. Jung Jae-young plays Ham Chun-su and Kim Min-hee plays Yoon Hee-jeong. It runs 121 minutes. It had its premiere in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2015, where it won the Golden Leopard, the festival’s top prize, and Jung Jae-young won the prize for best actor. It opened in South Korea on 24 September 2015 and reached Japanese cinemas on 30 June 2018, under a title that means, roughly, the right day and the mistaken day.

Two notes. The film was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as its published record and its critics describe them; where a detail rests on one critic’s account, the critic is named, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay follows both tellings of the day to the end, including how the second one closes. A line marks the place where that ending begins, for anyone who would rather meet it on screen first.

The first telling opens on a title card: Right Then, Wrong Now. Keep those words in mind. They come back.

Suwon, where Chun-su has come to show his film, is a big city in its own right, the capital of Gyeonggi Province, some thirty kilometres south of Seoul. For him it is a place to spend a spare day. In this telling the film lets us hear him think. Jonathan Romney, writing in Film Comment, describes him early on watching Bo-ra, a young woman from the festival staff, from his hotel window, and reminding himself, in his own voice on the soundtrack, to be careful, because she is too pretty. He flirts with her anyway and promises to call her. He never calls.

In the old hall he sees Hee-jeong. She recognises his name, though she has not seen his films, and agrees to coffee. There she tells him about herself: she used to work as a model, and found it empty, however good the money was, and now she paints. He goes with her to her studio and watches her work, and he praises what he sees.

They go for sushi and soju, and they get drunk. He tells her she is beautiful. He tells her he likes her as a friend, then as more than a friend, and he digs through his pockets for a ring to give her, a ring he does not have. Her mood darkens, and she tells him that she has no friends.

The night ends at a birthday gathering in a friend’s café. Hee-jeong tells her friends how moved she was by what he said about her painting, and an older friend, Soo-young, points out that he has said the same things in a good many interviews. She adds that he is known for chasing women, and that he is married. He admits it. Hee-jeong, drunk, goes to lie down in another room, and when he comes to her there she tells him to go. At home her mother scolds her for being drunk.

The next day he is hungover. At the discussion after his screening, a question from the critic who is moderating sets him off, and he is angry and erratic in front of the audience. Then he goes back to Seoul.

It is tempting to say that what goes wrong on the first day is a lie, and there is one: he lets her spend the day with him without telling her he is married. But the praise in the studio is the stranger failure, because it may not have been false. He may have meant every word. What emptied it was not its content. It was its address.

Adam Nayman, writing in Reverse Shot, noticed how the film handles those words. In the first telling what Chun-su says about her painting comes round three times: from him to her; back to him through her friends, which is how she discovers how little thought was in it; and once more at the discussion the next day, by which time, Nayman wrote, the words have “the sound of a punchline”. The repetition is the film’s joke and also its evidence. A sentence that turns up in interviews, in a studio and on a stage was never about the canvas in front of him. It was his sentence about painting, and her painting happened to be where he was standing when he said it.

That is what flattery is, underneath the pleasure of receiving it: a sentence about the speaker’s wanting, dressed as a sentence about the listener. It is built to please, and anything built to please can be used again, because it does not depend on looking. The ring he digs for and does not have belongs to the same family, a promise with nothing inside it. So does the voice on the soundtrack. On this day there are two of him, the one we hear thinking and the one she hears talking, and flattery lives in the gap between them.

This Library has drawn the line before. The essay “Being Seen Is Not the Same as Being Available” separated attention that treats a woman as a particular person from attention that treats her as one more instance of a category, and observed that the first can feel nourishing even from a stranger, because it required real observation rather than a generic script. Chun-su’s first day is a generic script, delivered well. Bo-ra is the proof. On the same day the same man offers the same warmth to a second young woman, with a promise to call that he never keeps. Attention that can be handed to two women in one day was not attention to either of them.

It would be easy, and unfair, to turn the first day into a lesson about a young woman who believed a famous man. The film does not pretend she did not want to hear what he said. Nor is there any reason to hold it against her.

Earlier that day she had told him something. She had been a model, and being looked at for a living had felt empty. She had turned to painting: away, one might say, from being looked at and towards looking, towards making something that could be judged for itself. Then a man whose eye is his living stands in her studio and tells her the work is good. Of course it reaches her. It lands exactly where she is trying to build a life, and it comes from someone whose opinion ought to mean something. Telling her friends about it that night is not vanity. It is what anyone does with the best thing that has happened to her all day.

That is why the party is so hard. Hee-jeong learns the truth about her own day last: in public, from a friend, in front of him. She learns that the praise was a set piece and that he is married, both at once, drunk, at a birthday, and nothing about the room lets her take it in privately.

Soo-young deserves a word. What she does is a kindness with a hard edge: an older friend telling a younger one what she knows about a man, out loud, because somebody, perhaps, ought to. It humiliates, because the setting humiliates. But the humiliation belongs to the lie, not to the friend who ended it.

And it matters what the lie had taken from her. Everything Hee-jeong agreed to that day, the coffee, the studio, the dinner, bringing him to her friends, she agreed to without the one fact that would have told her what kind of day it was. A choice made without that fact is not quite the same choice. When the fact arrives, she does what is hers to do. When he comes to her in the other room, she tells him to go.

Then she goes home, and her mother scolds her for being drunk. This is the part that deserves anger, aimed where it belongs. The lie was his; the scolding is hers. Tomorrow he will lose his temper in front of an audience and leave for Seoul. Tonight she is the one being told off at home.

Halfway through, the film begins again. The title card returns with its halves exchanged: what was Right Then, Wrong Now is now Right Now, Wrong Then. Again Chun-su is in Suwon a day early, with nothing to do. He goes to the old hall. She is there.

The critics found the differences as absorbing as the story. Mark Jenkins, reviewing the film for NPR, noted that the two versions are lit differently and shot from different angles, that only one of them has voiceover narration, and that even the weather changes, although both happen on the same day in the same place. Romney noticed that even the paint changes. In the first telling Hee-jeong mixes an orange-pink pigment; in the second the paint is blue-green. And this time, as Romney also noted, there is no Bo-ra to distract him.

The loss of the voice matters most. On the second day we do not hear Chun-su think. There is no second account running beside the one he gives her, and whatever he thinks, as far as the film lets us know, is what he says. The gap where the first day’s flattery lived has been closed, not by a change of heart announced on screen but by a change of form.

The two title cards can be read in more than one way, and what follows is this essay’s reading, not the film’s. A sentence is judged twice: once when it is said, and again later, in what is kept. Flattery is right then, in the moment it pleases, and wrong now, when it is remembered as a line. A true sentence is often wrong then. It stings, it spoils the mood, it risks the evening. It can still be right now. The film took its own title from the second card.

The second day is not the first day with the lies taken out. It goes to different places, and one of them is a roof.

At the coffee shop, this time, he asks about her life, and she tells him. She lives with her mother. Her father left after the divorce and moved to Seoul, and she does not see him. Nick Newman, reviewing the film for The Film Stage, described the second telling as a day on which he says better things and she answers him more openly, and this is what that looks like: a question, and an answer with somewhere to go.

At the studio he looks at the canvas and tells her what he sees. She paints with confidence, he says, and the quality is there; but the painting seems to have been made for her alone, and she needs to be bolder. She is outraged. He goes outside for a cigarette to get away from her anger. And then she takes him up to the roof and points out where she lives.

Set the two days side by side and the order is the film’s quiet surprise. On the first day, praise led to dinner, and dinner led to a humiliation. On the second, a sentence that hurt her led, soon after, to her showing him her home. Nayman passes on an observation by Roger Koza in Cinema Scope: the words about the painting are harsher the second time, even though she seems surer of herself. Both can be true at once. Perhaps she seems so because she is being taken seriously. Nobody troubles to criticise a painting they have not looked at.

That is the difference between the two sentences, in miniature. The first day’s praise could have been said about any canvas in Suwon. The second day’s criticism could only have been said about this one. It named what was there, the confidence and the quality, and it named what was missing, and to name what is missing a man has to have looked for it. It also cost him. It made her angry, and it might have ended the day there. The cost is not an accident of the true sentence. It is part of how she can tell it was addressed to her.

Romney thought the criticism too brusque, and wrote that it dented her self-esteem. This essay does not think he was wrong, and comes back to it below. But the film lets the sting do something the praise never did. It gives her something to answer.

The second day is his better day. It is also hers, and that is easier to miss. She is louder in it.

On the first day her clearest sentence comes at the end, from another room: the word that sends him away. On the second she is furious at the studio, and says so. At dinner she comes back to what he said and asks him why he thought her painting made her seem sad, and he tells her it is an air she gives off. As on the first day, she tells him she has no friends; this time he answers that it is all right, that it is probably just the way she is. He does not try to fix it. He lets it be hers.

The essay “The More You Perform Lovability, the Harder It Is to Hear Yourself” asked the question this second day answers: where is a woman allowed to be audible? It argued that the aim is not volume but access, and observed that people may speak freely where they feel secure and edit themselves where they do not. On the second day Hee-jeong’s anger does not end anything. She can be outraged with him and, soon after, show him where she lives.

Why that is possible deserves a sentence, and the answer is not that he has become kind. It is that he has become legible. A man who tells her the painting is closed in on itself has shown her what kind of attention he is paying. She knows where she stands with him, and a woman who knows where she stands can afford to lose her temper. The same is true, on a larger scale, of the fact he tells her at dinner.

Over sushi on the second day he tells her he would love to marry her, and that he cannot, because he has a wife and two children. He weeps. She tells him she wishes they had met earlier. Then he gives her a ring he found in the street, and she calls it their wedding ring.

It would be easy to turn this scene into romance, and easy to turn it into a sermon, and it is neither. Saying so does not make his courtship into something else. It is still a married man spending a day trying to win a woman he met that day. His wife and children enter the day as a sentence said over dinner; they are the people with the most at stake in it, and this essay keeps them in view without speaking for them.

What the sentence changes is who knows what. On the first day only one of the two knew what kind of day it was, a day with a family at the end of it, and the other found out at a party. On the second day they both know, and she hears it from him, across the table, while the rest of the evening is still hers to decide.

And look at what she does with it. She does not leave. She tells him she wishes they had met sooner, a sentence that accepts the facts and grieves them in the same breath. Then she takes his worthless ring and names it. On the first day he dug in his pockets for a ring he did not have. On the second he hands her something real and worth nothing, picked up off the street, and she is the one who decides what it means. A wedding ring, for a wedding that will not happen. It may be a joke. If so, it is the most honest joke in the film, because it knows exactly what it is.

The essay “Closer, and Confessing Everything Without Being Known” proposed a test for any confession: once the truth has been told, is the person who heard it more free, or less? The first day’s truth, arriving through a friend at a party, left Hee-jeong less free: exposed, and then scolded. The second day’s, told to her face and early, left her freer. Every choice she made after it was made with the facts in hand. The test does not come out wholly in his favour, and the case against this reading returns to why.

The party comes round again. This time her friends like him; they find him kind, nothing like his reputation. He drinks, passes out for a moment and passes it off as a bit of acting, and then, drunk, takes his clothes off at the table in front of her friends. Hee-jeong, as both Romney and Nayman describe it, is asleep in the next room and misses it.

Walking home, she takes a call from her mother. Her mother has already heard, and is amused. Hee-jeong laughs.

Put that beside the first party. The same café, the same friends, the same man, the same drink. On the first night the thing exposed was her own pleasure in his praise, in front of the friends she had told about it, and she went home to be scolded. On the second night the exposure is entirely his. He makes himself ridiculous, and the ridicule lands on him alone. The mother who scolded her the first time is laughing on the phone the second. The truth did not save anybody’s dignity. It simply stopped hers from being the one at stake.

The drinking should be described as plainly as the film shows it: soju at dinner and more at the party; on the first day, a hangover and a temper the next morning; on the second, a man who passes out and then undresses. This essay diagnoses no one. Writing about Hong’s films, Romney named among their insights the lesson “that drunkenness is the truest form of honesty”, and the second day gives him evidence. The man who weeps over sushi and the man at the party are the same man, several drinks in, and whether his truthfulness is a choice or a loss of control is a question this reading cannot settle.

From here, this essay describes how the second telling ends.

He walks her home and asks her to come back out afterwards, so that they can keep talking. She promises she will. She kisses his cheek. Her mother comes out, and Hee-jeong goes inside. Chun-su waits in the street, smoking, and she does not come out, and in the end he gives up.

Why she stays inside is not something this essay knows, and it will not guess. What it can say is what her staying inside does not mean. The promise at the door was not a contract. She kissed his cheek, she said she would come out, and she did not, and all three belonged to her; none of them was a debt. “Being Seen Is Not the Same as Being Available” put the principle plainly: being seen accurately is not an agreement to anything. By this essay’s reading Hee-jeong has been seen more accurately on the second day than at any moment of the first, and it obliges her to nothing.

What he does matters too. Waiting, and then giving up, is a small thing and the right one, and in a film this unsparing about him it is worth noticing when he gets something right.

The next day his talk goes well. Nayman noted how little of it we see this time, and that nobody loses their temper, and called that the best the film can do for a happy ending. Hee-jeong comes to see his film. He goes to her seat to say goodbye, and she tells him she will watch all his films from now on. Afterwards she walks off through the falling snow.

Remember where she began. She knew his name and had not seen his films. By the end she is promising to look at his work, all of it, from now on, as he looked, on the second day, at hers. The looking goes both ways at last, and in both directions it is aimed at the work rather than the face or the name. It is a small ending and a good one. He leaves. She walks into the snow, and into her own life.

The Japanese release title makes a choice the English one does not. The English sets two moments against each other, a now and a then. The Japanese sets two days side by side: a right day, and a mistaken one. The English asks when a sentence is judged. The Japanese invites the viewer to judge which day was right, and a viewer who comes to the film through that title may arrive expecting a verdict. Both titles are fair to the film. This essay has leaned on the English because its argument is about timing: a sentence that is wrong when it is said and right in what is kept.

Some of what the film is about has everyday names in Japanese. Oseji and shakō jirei are words for praise and pleasantries offered to keep things smooth rather than to be weighed. Having such words close to hand is a kind of protection. A woman who has learned to hear praise as courtesy is less exposed to what happens to Hee-jeong on the first day. But the habit has a price, and the second day shows it. If every compliment is discounted in advance, the one sentence that was meant can be discounted along with the rest, and the sentence that is meant does not always sound kind. It may arrive as an unwelcome remark about something she made.

The film’s map will be familiar, too, to anyone who lives some way from a centre. Suwon is a big city, but for Chun-su it is a place to pass a spare day before going back to Seoul. For Hee-jeong it is home; from the roof she points it out. A reader in Saitama or Chiba, or in any city an hour from somewhere that thinks of itself as the middle of things, may know that asymmetry: the visitor who has a day, and the woman who has a life. The second telling is the one in which she shows him the life.

And the film may reach one more reader in a particular place: a grown woman who took up Japanese late and now spends her working days in it. Perhaps she has been told, after her first few sentences, that her Japanese is very good. The person who says it may mean it kindly. It is also a sentence that could have been said to anyone who managed a greeting, which gives it the shape of Chun-su’s first-day praise: it notices that she tried, not what she said. What she may come to value more is the rarer remark, the one that stings: the colleague who tells her that a phrase is correct and still not what anyone would say, and then shows her what they would say instead. It can hurt the way the studio hurts Hee-jeong. It is also the first sign that someone is listening to her Japanese rather than applauding it.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the one a critic put most sharply.

First, the honesty may be a technique. Jenkins, for NPR, asked of the two versions of Chun-su whether either is genuine, or whether they are just “alternate, and equally calculating, seduction techniques”. He added that the first, gentle and diplomatic, is less appealing than the second, brash and candid. If candour is simply the better line, the difference this essay has built on collapses into efficiency: the second day goes better because he has found a method that works. The reply available is narrow. Whatever his motive, the second day’s truths hand her what she needs to refuse him, and in the end she does not come back out. A technique that equips the other person to say no is an odd sort of technique. But motives cannot be read off a screen, and a man can learn that honesty works.

Second, the truth may belong to the soju. His most personal truths on the second day, the marriage and the tears, come over drink, and the party comes after more of it. If truth arrives only when control goes, it was not chosen, and a reading that praises it as a choice gives him credit he has not earned. The first day’s hungover outburst at the discussion was unguarded in its own way too.

Third, the film may refuse the verdict this essay has reached. The two title cards can be read as a symmetry rather than a correction, each day right from one place and wrong from another, with neither labelled the true one. Romney even wondered whether the first part might be a story Chun-su was writing about the real events of the second. An essay that crowns the second day may be imposing the very moral the film’s structure withholds. This essay can only say that it is a reading, and that the film shows both days.

Fourth, and closest to Hee-jeong: the film is still built around his day. The voice we hear thinking on the first day is his. On both days her life is organised around a famous man’s attention, and even the ending this essay has called reciprocal makes her his audience: the last thing she promises is to watch his films. A reader who finds that the film’s happiest image is a young woman becoming a man’s viewer is not misreading. The narrow reply is that she chooses what to look at, and then walks off alone into a life that does not wait for him. That narrows the objection. It does not answer it.

Fifth, a truth can be a weight handed over. The freer-or-less-free test does not come out cleanly. When he weeps over sushi and says he would marry her if he could, he gives her information, and he also gives her his sorrow to hold. She answers with a wish that they had met earlier, which is generous, and which means that part of her evening goes on comforting him about the life he is going home to. The criticism of her painting may be a truth told partly for the teller, too: advice to be braver is cheap from a man whose career is made. Honesty, in this film, is better than flattery. It is not the same thing as care.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A compliment can be sincere and still be addressed to no one. The test is not whether he meant it. It is whether it could have been said, word for word, to somebody else.

A true sentence about someone’s work usually costs the speaker something, the mood or the evening or her good opinion, and the cost is part of how she can tell it was meant for her. It may arrive sounding like an insult. It may also simply be too brusque. Both happen.

And a truth told to a woman is, before anything else, information for her own decisions. It tells her what kind of day she is in. It does not oblige her to anything, least of all to the man who told it. Hee-jeong is seen on the second day, and she still stays inside.

So, once, to you, if you were ever moved by praise you later heard the same person give to someone else. You were not foolish. The words were made to move; that was their job, and they did it. What you hoped for was reasonable: to be looked at in your work by someone who could tell good from not yet. The sentence that actually does that is rarer, and the first time, it may sound like an insult. You are allowed to be furious at it, and then to decide, in your own time, whether to show anyone the roof.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about any relationship.

The critics this essay names are Jonathan Romney in Film Comment, Adam Nayman in Reverse Shot, who also passes on an observation by Roger Koza in Cinema Scope, Mark Jenkins for NPR, and Nick Newman for The Film Stage. Their words appear in quotation marks only where the essay has them exactly; everything else of theirs is paraphrased.

The prizes at Locarno in 2015 are given as the festival’s results were reported at the time, and no other award is claimed. The release dates in South Korea and Japan are those of the film’s standard records.

The distinction between praise addressed to no one and a true sentence addressed to her is this essay’s reading, not a finding. The reading of the two title cards is one among several, and the case against it is set out above.

No director, performer, critic or publication named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

Whose praise has stayed with you longest? Could it have been said, word for word, to someone else?

When did someone last tell you something true about your work? How did it feel that day, and how does it feel now?

Have you ever spent a day with someone who knew something about it that you did not? What would you have done with that day, if you had known?

Where, and with whom, are you allowed to be furious and stay?

Whose work have you promised to keep looking at? And who looks at yours that way?