Review of Yours and Yours / 당신자신과 당신의 것, directed by Hong Sang-soo

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

Kanopy was my best friend for a certain amount of time while I was unemployed. I am thankfully employed by the time this blog post is going to come out, which is an incredibly blessing. But for over a year, I did not have a full time job, and while I was able to travel and survive off of my savings, I was really crunching my numbers financially.

My local library gives us Kanopy with an allotted amount of movies per month. It usually comes out to about 20 or so movies, and I never hit the limit between all of my streaming platforms, but I still use it for a lot of the indie and foreign movies that I like to watch. One of my projects is I wanted to watch all of Hong Sang-soo’s movies, which was a fail, but I did knock out a solid chunk.

Yourself and Yours was one of the movies that I did really want to watch during this period. I procrastinated on it for a hot minute before I got around to watching it, but when I did sit down with it the film went by quickly. A lot of Hong’s movies clock in at about an hour and a half, which means they’re not too time intensive.

Let’s get into the review portion of this post! I can feel myself starting to ramble a little bit, and I don’t want to bore you with the more mundane details.

After a couple decides to pause their relationship, we see interesting things happening to them afterward.

We begin this movie meeting the couple in question from the header above. They’re Yeong-soo and Min-jeong, and while they live modestly together, they’re having some friction at the beginning of the movie. Yeong-soo, a painter, is dealing with the fact his mother is sick, but when he hears a rumor that Min-jeong might be going to bars and drinking, it effectively pisses him off.

Turns out she had promised him before this moment that she was going to drink less. We see him go home, meet with Min-jeong, and then they get into a fight about it. It’s in that scene they decide they need to have a time where they’re no longer dating, as this is becoming a major problem for both of them.

Thus begins the crux of the rest of the movie. The very next day, much to Yeong-soo’s chagrin (as he hears about the woman who looks just like her), Min-jeong disappears. Instead, a woman who looks exactly like Min-jeong is the one we focus on.

She’s going around town in search of the perfect man for her, and we see her go on a series of dates and meeting different men (including some actors who are regulars in Hong’s movies).

Anyways: this is probably the woman that Yeong-soo’s buddies saw drinking, as she’s often at the bars. When asked if she is Min-jeong though she denies it and says she is the girl’s twin sister, which leads to even more questions about whether this is or isn’t true. It’s a Hong movie, so the way I watched this one is to break down how exactly Min-jeong and her twin are being perceived by the men who interact with them.

Min-jeong does eventually reappear in the film as herself, but not before we get all of these meta discussions about Young-soo and her.

Something I find interesting to trace in Hong’s movies are the discussion of women and how it broadly reflects attitudes in Korean society. Sometimes he has something interesting to say about it, but at other times he reinforces or mirrors the rigid attitudes towards women in the peninsula.

Overall Thoughts

I feel like Hong movies are ones you’re either lukewarm about or despise. I’ve found few of his movies that I have genuinely loved or enjoyed (The Novelist’s Film is one of them), and he knows what he likes. Hence why a lot of his movies are very similar and tend to reflect on similar themes.

Anyways: I did kind of enjoy Yourself and Yours, although I don’t know if it’s a movie that I’m going to be returning to in the near future. I was more interested in the gender analysis behind this movie, as well as the town that was depicted in it.

I find a lot of Korean movies and dramas tend to depict life there from behind a very specific and glamorized lens, which is something that Hong usually refuses to do. I like his mundane settings and people, which is probably why I keep gravitating back to his work even when I complain about it.

I say watch this one if it interests you. It’s not too long, so it can be something you watch after work one day, or you sit down on a Friday night to relax and let yourself escape into the world of this movie. I’m glad I watched it in the end.

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