This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Walter Biggins’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
One of my favorite Hong films of recent memory, though I’m hard-pressed to explain why. A Japanese man travels to a Korean seaside town, in search of a lost love of-sorts who taught with him at a university there. Actually, scratch that: it’s unclear how much was consummated, or how much she wants to see him in the first place. She’s disappeared from his life and from the town, though the first shots are of her, and the whole movie is framed by his letters to her, which she reads as the movie advances. So it could be said that the entire movie consists of her visions of his letters to her—the movie’s vignettes (i.e., letters) are punctuated by her flipping the pages at a cafe—sent to her about a week before he arrives there. Or it could be that the vignettes are the events that he experienced, and not her imaginings of them at all. Hard to tell the difference between dream state and reality, as per usual in Hong’s movies.
Anyway, the Japanese man can’t speak Korean, the Koreans with whom he interacts can’t speak Japanese, and so the lingua franca is English. This makes for awkwardness, a tension because no one in the movie can truly speak his/her mind fully, and fumbles to make sense of events. I don’t mean that the English is broken or stereotypically cartoonish—it isn’t—but that there’s almost always a hesitation, a resistance, in even the most casual conversations. Mori (the Japanese man) feels alienated, and the language not-quite-barrier is a good way of expressing that.
Translation is key to Hill of Freedom, anyway. His lady love translates his letters—come to think of it, it’s never clear whether he’s writing to her in English, Japanese, or Korean—into her imagining of what transpired. No one speaks the other’s native tongue in this movie but everyone gets their basic points across, and the language not-quite-barrier doesn’t stop anyone from talking about “the Koreans” or “the Japanese” in broad strokes. Mori ends up at the restaurant that’s the fulcrum for the movie—and where his absent lover reads his letters—because it has a Japanese name (which translates to “Hill of Freedom”), so it feels like home to him. (I remember being in Paris in the late-1990s, in Europe for the first time, and gravitating to the McDonald’s, even though I rarely ate at the chain when in the States...) There are miscommunications borne of translation errors throughout, and the reader may misunderstand his intent a bit because, late in the movie, it becomes clear that she’s not quite reading them in chronological order.
And then it’s not quite clear, even at the end, what actually happened and what’s a fantasy. Mori and the reader reunite but it seems like that is actually a drunken dream, and that in reality he’s slept with the owner/operator of Hill of Freedom... where the reader read his letters, which generate this movie in the first place. And, of course, the restauranteur and the reader know each other. Except that even that sex connection doesn’t seem to have happened as romantically as we’ve seen it depicted. And, by the end, who’s doing the imagining, anyway? Has this whole thing been his drunken imagining, or has it all been how she’s imagined his life based on the letters?
Tricky film, with lots of potential variations, and a broadly melancholy heart at its core.