Baek Seung-bin’s third feature’s literary pretensions go beyond his borrowing the title of William Maxwell’s classic 1979 novel. There’s a gay bar that figures centrally in the plot called Giovanni’s Room, the title of an early James Baldwin novel and one of the characters grows up to pen an award-winning work of fiction that takes place in parallel universes, a situation that mirrors the plot of Baek’s own movie, which reportedly is a response to an “existential crisis” the director experienced. The protagonist’s own existential crisis would seem to be a lifelong one, and starts with the departure of the high school classmate he loves after the suicide of the latter’s beloved mother, who happened to be a professional poet and English lit scholar. Baek doesn’t go much into detail regarding the relationship between the protagonist, Dong-jun (Sim Hee-seop), and the mournful friend, Kang-hyun (Shin Joo-hyup), but simply presents it as a given, with isolated scenes of the two trading philosophical bon mots and getting chastely physical. The difference is that Kang-hyun believes life isn’t worth living without risk-taking—his hero is the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit—while Dong-joon dreads the future, but doesn’t realize why until Kang-hyun goes away.

The bulk of the movie takes place in three what-if scenarios, as if Dong-joon, now 42 years old, were only a figment of Baek’s imagination as a writer. The conceit of having Dong-joon lead three separate lives depending on which life path he chooses at an early juncture would probably work better if Dong-joon were a more sympathetic character, but the one quality that all three of his “me’s” share is moroseness. In one life he’s an English lit professor who drinks too much and mopes around his office, trying to hide his homosexuality though everyone seems to know about it and doesn’t really give a shit, thus making his gloomy attitude not just pointless but annoying. In a second narrative, he’s a modest and hopeful cram school teacher with some literary pretensions of his own who is a good brother to a married sister undergoing a cancer scare, a good brother-in-law to the sister’s good-natured but ineffectual policeman husband, and a terrific uncle to the couple’s mildly rebellious teenage daughter; but still morose. In the third universe he’s again the heavy, though he seems to have mended whatever wayward tendencies ruined his marriage and turned his son into a convict. The proof of his redemption is the friendship of a construction worker widower-father who has his own literary pretensions that Dong-joon encourages is a selfless way—or is his interest more erotic in nature?

The other thing all three narratives have in common is that they all eventually lead back to Kang-hyun, an outcome that feels anticlimactic by definition, since it seems to happen three times. The trouble with movie scripts that want to be novels and movie directors who aspire to be Willam Maxwell is that both tend to create worlds that can only be effectively conveyed through unique literary stylings. Despite its formal ambitions, So Long, See You Tomorrow, the movie, is emotionally incoherent, which is especially disappointing. Right now, Korean cinema could really use a good, honest, straightforward fiction movie about queer longing. 

The parallel universe depicted in Singapore director Eric Khoo’s Spirit World is a more conventional literary conceit: the afterlife, which here is inhabited by two recently deceased souls who are stuck watching a living person try to find meaning in a life that has become a chore. The fact that one of these two souls is a famous chanson singer named Claire played by Catherine Deneuve and the afterlife seems limited to Japan, specifically the Pacific coast of the lower Kanto region, says more about Khoo’s peculiar creative obsessions than it does about his beliefs. 

The other departed-but-not-yet-enraptured soul is piano tuner Yuzo (Masaaki Sakai), one of Claire’s biggest fans who died only days before the singer was to make her long-awaited concert return to Japan, and thus his son, Hayato (Yutaka Takenouchi), a blocked film director, goes to the concert in his place as a kind of tribute to the old man. Claire dies while drinking a mess of nihonshu after the show and meets Yuzo on the other side. He tells her one of the rules of the afterlife is that newly embarked souls can’t cross over oceans (who makes these rules?), and so the pair spends the rest of the movie watching over Hayato as he slips into his own existential crisis, one that seems to have been triggered not so much by his father’s death or, for that matter, his reconnecting with his estranged mother (Jun Fubuki, behaving the total opposite of how you would expect a woman who abandoned her son as a young child would), but rather by his disappointment in how his career turned out. Based on what we’re shown it’s likely his cinematic vision tanked because he just drinks too much. 

Khoo, along with his scriptwriter, Edward Khoo, has even less to say philosophically about the higher purpose of living one’s life gracefully than Baek does, and for the most part the viewer can do little more than tag along with Spirit World, whose internal logic, even as a fantasy, not only defies common narrative sense but lacks any recognizable emotional contours. The afterlife, it would seem, is pretty boring. 

So Long, See You Tomorrow, in Korean, is now playing in Tokyo at Cine Libre Ikebukuro (03-3590-2126).

Spirit World, in French, Japanese, and English, is now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

So Long, See You Tomorrow home page in Japanese

Spirit World home page in Japanese

So Long, See You Tomorrow photo (c) Lewis Pictures

Spirit World photo (c) 2024 Spirit World film partners