Walk Up First Draft

Complete first draft for Reverse Shot.

As surely as communal drinking, playful structural experiments, and zooms, the familiarity of spaces has long been a cornerstone of Hong Sang-soo’s films. Indeed, besides the selection of his actors, which has increasingly revolved around his repertory players like Kim Min-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo, and Lee Hye-young, the only preparation he does for his films is location scouting. A few weeks before the shoot, he asks various cafés, bars, and other such locations if he can film there, leaving such afterthoughts as narrative and dialogue to the day each scene is shot. While other Hong films have used places as an anchoring device, returning over and over to them as a means to ground the viewer amidst the confounding iterations of a similar narrative several times over, none of them have been so overtly dedicated to this conceit as Walk Up, his second film of 2022. The space here is a walk-up apartment building with four floors and a basement owned by interior designer Ms. Kim (Lee), which filmmaker Byung-soo (Kwon) tours during the first of the film’s four parts. The first and second floors are occupied by Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi), a restauranteur; the third by a couple; the fourth by a reclusive male artist; and the basement is designated as a workspace for Kim, even though she spends little time there. Throughout each of the four parts, this fundamental configuration stays the same, but the people who embody these archetypes change dramatically. As separated by an indeterminate amount of time, the four days depicted in Walk Up gradually traces vast changes in Byung-soo’s life over what might be a few months, a year, a decade, or even — in keeping with Hong’s penchant for repetition — across alternate realities. This sense of slippage isn’t necessarily new to Hong’s work but Walk Up’s willingness to totally deviate in the events — but not the structure, which is of course structured around one or two scenes of people speaking unguardedly under the influence of wine or soju — of each part means that the fuzzy temporal links are more subterranean and trickier to parse than any of his prior films. Indeed, each part opens with Byung-soo in different circumstances, especially the first, which finds him visiting the building with his estranged daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so). It is the first time he has seen either his daughter or Kim in a number of years, and that initial awkwardness seems to build until it is abruptly broken by the apartment tour, a physical activity to provide anything else to talk about. Walk Up is deceptively withholding in this initial tour, even as it clearly establishes the spaces that Byung-soo will occupy in the following parts. The second floor of the restaurant, reserved for cooking classes and special customers, is only glimpsed through a curtained window. Eccentricities abound, each little detail latching into the viewer’s mind: the tenants’ propensity for leaving their doors unlocked, the Bressonian view of shoes on the stairs which makes great use of verticality, the sight of Byung-soo surrounded by the fourth-floor painters’ scattered belongings. Crucially, none of these inhabitants are either seen or named, left as abstractions for one to fill in based on image and dialogue. These absences form one of Walk Up’s most enriching and complex aspects. Much of the film is given over to conversations about people not currently in the scene, forcing the viewer to triangulate their view of a character between past and future scenes and what is said about them out of earshot. For instance, Jeong-su and Jules (Shin Seok-ho), an employee of some sort in the apartment building, have a conversation about Ms. Kim immediately after the tour finishes, where the young man’s characterization of his employer runs largely counter to the viewer’s perception of her at this moment. To complicate things even further, it is totally unclear whether the two older adults still remain on the rooftop during this scene, or if they are already in the basement that serves as the location for the rest of the first part. Such little disruptions of equilibrium come to accrue a great force that culminates in one of the deftest sleights of hand by any filmmaker in recent memory, a conclusion that only further deepens the ambiguity. To say too much about the turns that Walk Up takes would be to deny even a little bit of the immense paths of exploration that Hong undertakes in this single location that stands in so much more. But one thing can be said without further elaboration: this is perhaps Hong’s most haunting film, one which captures the drudgery of life even in almost completely different circumstances. Whether it be romantic entanglements, familial troubles, or monetary issues, they remain doggedly attached to Byung-soo. The clue really is in the title: in such a compact building, walking up isn’t very different from standing still.