Hong Sangsoo’s Walk Up is another entry in his growing oeuvre as he uses a four-story building to structurally depict a filmmaker’s career through family, relationships, and being.
In 2022, Hong Sangsoo’s second feature of the year and his twenty-eighth overall, Walk Up, a black and white feature that continues to create elaborate storytelling in such simple ways through structure and dialogue. Structure is playfully toyed at through its setting, a four-floor building containing a basement, restaurant, studio, and an attic suit for living with a balcony. The repeatedly self-critical director goes at himself in humorous ways in each floor as he confronts the usual subjects of his films: art, film, relationships, and love.
The film opens at the ground level, outside the building complex where Byungsoo (Kwon Haeyo) and his estranged daughter, Jeonsu (Park Miso) visit Byungsoo’s old acquaintance, Ms. Kim (Hyeyeoung Lee), an interior designer to help his daughter’s interest in interior design post graduation. Byungsoo and Kim haven’t seen each other in years, and Kim’s thirst over Hong and his successful career as a filmmaker is clearly palpable. Kim tours each of the floors, establishing each of the floors where the film will take us through, in jarring Hongion fashion, the past, present, and future.
What Walk Up does like most Hong films, is exposing and critically analyze Byungsoo, the surrogate for Hong, in the confines of the building, where members of the cast come and go, allowing the only remaining to be a time in Byungsoo’s life. Early in the film, Byungsoo leaves for a call to meet the studio’s executive for a meeting, leaving Kim and Jeonsu. The two begin to drink and talk about her career, and later once, the wine is finished, Sunhee goes out to get more alcohol. Next scene, we’re on the first floor in the restaurant with Byungsoo, Kim, and the other resident of the building, Sunhee, who’s in charge of the restaurant, and with the simple transition to the restaurant, we’re months ahead.
These passes of times directly relate to setting. Each level act as a time in each of the characters life, extracting information from below. As we reach a higher level, Byungsoo gets older and reflects in a different stage of his career. When we reach the restaurant on the first floor, Byungsoo, Kim, and Sunhee (Song Sunmi) share a meal/drink over admiration of Byungsoo career, a clear indication of what we can assume to be a fictionalized interaction of Hong’s life. Kim and Sunhee blatantly praise Byungsoo, leaving him embarrassed and humbled. Sunhee, a huge fan of Byungsoo confesses that his film makes her cry and laugh, relatable to her life, where Byungsoo becomes intrigued at her point of view, interested in her.
On the third floor, several months pass by, and Byungsoo appears to be in a relationship with Sunhee, where the main conflict becomes infidelity and insecurity. But before, more peculiar details of Byungsoo appears such as giving up meat and COVID related details regarding a film festival retrospective. We now know at least this appears to be in the not long ago past. Sunhee meets with an old friend, while Byungsoo tenderly lays in fetal position in bed for a scene lasting several minutes long. While the camera stays on Byungsoo, his physical expressions tell us that the relation is looming.
The top floor, or attic/balcony is where Byungsoo is now eating meat with his real estate agent, Jiyoung (Cho Yunhee). Months have passed and Sunhee is now part of his past, and Byungsoo is now merely annoyed by Kim’s bothersome tendencies. Jiyoung cooks for him and Byungsoo shares a premonition where he met God on the same balcony (heaven?). Byungsoo said that God appeared to him and told him to move to Jeju Island and make 12 films. A surreal and hilarious conversation as Walk Up is exactly 12 films after his 2014 film, Hill of Freedom, making the next film after this premonition, to be Right Now, Wrong Then, his Golden Leopard winner, and first collaboration with now partner Kim Min-hee. Maybe after this premonition, Byungsoo’s love and working life ultimately changes forever. Its end takes a shifting turn once Byungsoo and Jiyoung head down to depart ways, leaving Byungsoo where it all began.
For each of the floors, Byungsoo’s relationship with each women all contribute to his psyche; Jeonsu, the estranged daughter where both abandons each other after using each other for their own interior motives (Byungsoo to make up for being a distant father, Jeonsu to work for Kim for her artistic endeavors); Sunhee, the beautiful admirer of his, but also realizing its his films she’s into, not him; Kim, the old friend/crush, but now realizes he’s over her; and Jiyoung, the platonic friend where he can really just be himself and open up. In 2022, Hong’s two films are some of his most tender and self-analytical where he can be completely aware and open of his faults, as such with the human condition.
