NYFF Report: Korean Rom-Com 'Hill of Freedom' Is Slight, But Clever and Inventive
Seo Young-hwa and Ryo Kase in the romantic comedy ‘Hill of Freedom’
If you’ve ever wondered what a romantic-comedy version of Memento might look like, Hill of Freedom provides some clue. Just as Christopher Nolan shuffled the chronology of his 2000 breakthrough thriller, South Korean director Hong Sang-soo gives a non-sequential treatment to his cross-cultural love story. In the movie’s first scene, a young Korean woman, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) receives a stack of handwritten letters—remember those?—from her visiting Japanese boyfriend, Mori (Ryo Kase), and accidentally scatters the pages all over the floor. When she finally settles into read them at her neighborhood café (the titular “Hill of Freedom”), Mori’s carefully organized chronicle becomes more like a jigsaw puzzle, starting in the middle and skipping back-and-forth in time.
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Little by little, an overall picture of his experiences starts to take shape. It seems that Mori turned up in Seoul unannounced, intending to propose to Kwon, only to find that she had left town for an extended vacation. In her absence, he settled in at a local rooming house, befriending the cantankerous owner and her obnoxious nephew. He also logged a number of hours at the Hill of Freedom, where he struck up a flirtation with a cute waitress that, at some point, turned into something more serious…though not serious enough for him to write a “Dear Jane” letter to Kwon.
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Running a brief 68 minutes, Hill of Freedom is a wisp of a film, but it’s a funny, involving wisp that makes clever use of its scrambled-timeline premise, and finds lots of humor in Mori’s dazed interactions with the eccentric folks he runs into while waiting for the love of his life to return. In that way, it’s a lot less like one of Nolan’s meticulously executed, incredibly self-serious pictures — and a lot more of a culture-clash comic lark along the lines of Local Hero. If it worked here, just think of how many American rom-coms might be improved by ditching chronological order.
Photo credit: © 2014 Jeonwonsa Film Co.
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