Kim Jong-kwan's 'The Table: Day and Night' Opens Busan, Draws Tepid — SkimNews
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- Kim Jong-kwan directed 'The Table: Day and Night,' a four-vignette romantic anthology set in a Seoul café and structured around seasonal encounters between strangers, opening this year's Busan Film Festival
- The ensemble features Kim Min-ha, Shim Eun-kyung and Han Sun-hwa, with the reviewer singling out the women as 'infinitely more interesting protagonists' than their male counterparts
- The film expands Kim's 2016 feature 'The Table,' which also centered on four couples meeting at the same café table, continuing his pattern of loosely linked vignette storytelling seen in Netflix's 'Persona' (2019) and 'The Killers' (2024)
- The four chapters are titled 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' 'Still Ourselves,' 'T.P.A.' and a final segment about aspiring pop idol Nakyung and her childhood boyfriend Jong-su
- Cinematographer Kim Ji-yong, who shot Park Chan-wook's 'Decision to Leave' and Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love,' lenses the café in warm hues, with walls lined in oil paintings of forlorn figures that mirror the real clientele
- The review predicts a 'muted response further afield, limited only to specialist Asian showcases,' describing Kim's effort as 'frothy, fitfully engaging' and ultimately more interested in the café's storytelling potential than the characters within it
Why it matters: The film positions Kim Jong-kwan as a fixture of South Korea's omnibus-style filmmaking scene, with a Busan opening that gives a high-profile platform to a director whose body of work — from Netflix's 'Persona' to 'The Killers' — increasingly defines the anthology format in Korean cinema, though the review suggests the format's limits are showing.
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