About the Film
A woman in her early 40s, Sangwon, who is an actress who has been away from Korea for a while, and who has lost faith in her profession, is temporarily living at the home of her good friend, Jung-soo, who is raising a cat. In another place, another person, Hong, an acclaimed poet in his 70s, opens his house to a budding documentary filmmaker. Hong lives alone since his cat died of old age. Today each of them, Jung-soo and Hong, had a visitor -- a woman in her 20s for the woman, and a man in his 30s for the old man. Both visitors came with serious questions to ask. The woman answered them rather briefly while standing up, while the old man ended up giving longer answers in an extended conversation. Both of them had Ramyun (instant noodles) for lunch in front of their guests, and coincidentally enough, and though not a common practice, they both added hot pepper paste to their instant noodles.
A clue, may be, for those who would like to find necessary crossovers between the two strands, such as the presence of cats, or the commitment to stop smoking in one, or to give up alcohol in the other. But it is certainly not the plot that is important; rather, In Our Day invites us to look at what intimately matters every day, the salt of our lives, and it does so in a minimalist, ironic, immediate and empathetic way, with easy and skilful direction. Hong’s 30th feature film renews his human taste, his technical wisdom, with long shots and permeability to the wonder of small things, from the rock-paper-scissors game to the feline escape.
In the two parallel stories that we follow, and which have several conceptual points of contact, it is easy to detect a theoretical reflection on the differences between male and female approaches to the elaboration of pleasure, but in the end the secret is not to settle, but to be truly content. Content of what one has and of what should not have .. alcohol and cigarettes.
Teresa Cavina
