Loved The Power of Kangwon Province. I particularly liked the use of reflections throughout the film, often using windows that are angled to show characters leaving shot directly behind the camera, which creates a nice 360° sense enveloping the audience as someone disappears both towards and past the camera as well as away from it and further into frame in their reflection. I thought that was quite a neat use of space.
There is a simpler her/him structure this time, though in this one the time periods overlap instead of follow on from one another. I liked the way that Ji-Sook and her friend's trip is the shorter but more significant in plot and event terms and then then the longer time spent on Sang-Kwon's trip is less incident packed but has a lot of resonances back to the earlier section, though not exactly in a cause and effect way. What seemed the innocent almost childish fun trip for Ji-Sook and her friends becomes something consequence filled, while the adult teacher's journey becomes very superficial (ending with a couple of escort girls, disappointing sex and an argument about paying for their meal at the club so as not to lose face).
I like the way that there is a slight temporal overlap in the way the stories are handled following the Ji-Sook sequence and the move to Sang-Kwon we spend some time with him in a few scenes giving some context to his home and job-searching life before he embarks on his trip with his friend/potential workmate. Then, while he meets Ji-Sook a scene before the end of his section (and the film), I feel that this hotel room scene between them takes place just after Ji-Sook makes her second trip to Kangwon to meet the policeman again. Her scene of crying inconsolably in the bus at the end of her sequence therefore to me feels like it temporally coincides with Sangkwon finding that only one fish now remains in its makeshift bowl.
I also like that the hotel room meeting between the Jisook and Sangkwon completely recontextualises Ji-Sook's story and sent me reeling back through the film to see how it was affected by this new knowledge. That seems from these two films to be a Hong Sang-soo trademark, necessitating at least a second viewing to gain a new perspective on events now being in possession of the previously withheld knowledge.
This might just have been me being naive but I initially responded to her section as being sexless and that she and the policeman had an attraction (maybe permitted by the way that Ji-Sook's friend has a fight with her about already being in a relationship with a married man, so it shows that the policeman's marriage isn't necessarily a barrier to their relationship!), cuddled together that one night when drunk, and her wish to actually begin a relationship with the policeman led to her second trip to Kangwon on her own. From that I assumed that her anger towards the policeman for keeping her waiting was some kind of assertion of her power in this potential relationship and that she would be cuckolding him. Then the policeman's comment that he was thinking of leaving the police sort of shatters her illusions about him, of the authority he would have without a uniform. So both of them end up unable to properly talk to each other, leave on genial terms but a relationship is a complete impossibility between them.
It becomes obvious relatively early on in his section that Sangkwon is the married man who Jisook was having an affair with. We see his seemingly happy home life but also his half-hearted attempts to find work as a teacher (needing to be cajoled into putting the application in by his wife and friend!) Again, in his interactions with the woman who is due for a fateful appointment off of a cliff, the escort girls and eventually Jisook herself there is a sense of impotence in life being expressed through an overactive libido. The way he is rebuffed in the first instance and has the girl underneath him constantly begging him to finish up in the second, perhaps is what leads to using Jisook for oral sex even despite her rather upsetting revelation.
SpoilerShow
Jisook's abortion completely changes the nature of her previous encounter with the policeman, making that friendly drunk cuddling into something more disturbing and as almost a date rape. It also explains Jisook getting upset at being left to wait for the policeman to pick her up, her angry scene seeming more genuine upset than power posturing, as well as helping to explain the meaning behind some of the smaller moments such as the scales or finding the taste of her drink bitter. She leaves the policeman completely in the dark about her pregnancy, but the structure has let us experience what the policeman must have been feeling, the confusion without properly understanding why. Though his knowledge of the consequences of having sex during her first visit must have been at the back of his mind and is likely what inspires his drunken half-suicide attempt from a balcony, a call back to the earlier film that had an enigmatic relationship with balconies?
But beyond the plotting I particularly liked the many juxtapositions - the country and the city being an obvious one, but also the fish that Jisook finds on the road compares to the fish that Sangkwon takes in an looks after during his section (which themselves get compared to a healthier fish in a real fishtank that turns out to be one of those restaurant displays - so it gets scooped out and ends up on a dinnerplate!); Jisook's aborted child and stunted relationship with the policeman compared to Sangkwon's abandoning of his wife and child for a busman's holiday; Sangkwon's friend rejecting the more expensive Japanese imported eyedrops for a cheaper local kind comparing to Sangkwon insisting on paying for everything during their trip, as if aware of his friend’s feeling of imposition and wanting to reverse the tables so that his friend knows what it is like to be in someone else's debt; Sangkwon's trip to the monastery and seeing Jisook's message; that darn Perfect Day song getting played in a loop at the faculty dinner, with its heavy handed message of "You reap just what you sow" seeming apt for this film but also reminding me of the way that it was the song that the BBC used throughout 1997 to clumsily threaten viewers with the absolute necessity of the licence fee! (Before the "You wouldn't steal a car" infomercial perhaps the most patronising and insulting trail ever produced in its "reap! reap! what you sow!" refrain and "Start or Stop?" button!)
Also the way that Sangkwon after dropping off his application form is seen on a road with a stray dog and stops hidden behind a thin tree seems to relate to the way that when he is confronting the wife in a lobby area about not waiting for drinks with them the husband listening from a distance momentarily stops when hidden from view in the line of the glass doors. This made me think of Sangkwon being in some ways responsible for the wife's death by enflaming the husband's jealousy and causing him to throw her from the cliff!
The moment in the club where Sangkwon is seen on his own on the steps brooding which then moves into the argument scene with his friend about paying for everything bears relation to Day A Pig Fell Into The Well where our novelist is seen briefly sat in the lobby outside the dinner party before returning and escalating the mental conflict into an explicitly verbal and then physical one
The seemingly respectable (and older) wife and husband approaching a fateful and inevitable offscreen event suggests there are no particularly stable relationships left – it all seems to be about people withholding information from others or hurting them because of jealousy or needing to prove who has the upper hand in a relationship. Similarly in work life there is the powerful Professor that Sangkwon is courting with a visit to his home and the gift of some whiskey yet I didn't feel much sympathy towards him, mainly because he keeps his VHS tapes scattered about outside of their cases! Not to mention that in return for the whiskey he serves his guest some cola with some sort of insect floating in it! And finally he keeps Sangkwon's umbrella, even committing the cardinal sin of opening it up indoors! So there doesn't seem to be much hope for the older generation either to set an example!
The ending is again stunning, and feels like a call back to the ending of Day A Pig Fell Into The Well. It features another character at the end of one thread of their lives and on the verge of a new one (in this case Sangkwon is changing jobs) and the shot is even composed similarly, though the actions of the character are a little jumbled up from earlier - instead of a light space and the character putting papers down then turning to the balcony and opening a door, here it is a dark space and the character goes to the window and opens it first before turning back into the room and looking at the one remaining fish. There's a loneliness and introspection there, and strangely the thing that the final shot of the film reminded me of most was the final shot of Element of Crime!
I was left thinking that these characters probably hoped that a trip to a different place could let them leave all their troubles behind and let them have consequence free fun, but of course they end up taking their problems with them wherever they go, and even create new ones which throw new light on everything else leading up to that point.
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