Hong’s method is akin to drypoint: a sort of Impressionism of spontaneity, intricacy, and solidity, in which the rapid gesture gains in weight as it’s extended in time. He relies on copious, blunt, expressive, and philosophically reflective dialogue that is nonetheless entirely in keeping with the personalities of the speakers and with the immediate logic of the action. Like all melodramatists, Hong deals in coincidence and magnifies casual connections and minor accidents into life-shaking events. Without restraining his characters’ relentless forward motion with exposition, he finds them burdened by their past and revealing it in brief but incendiary flashes at unguarded moments of conversation. As ever in Hong’s movies, one of the key looseners of such talk is alcohol—which, here, takes on a peculiarly gendered role, as Oryeong, quickly bonding with Donghwa by admiring the oddity and beauty of the younger man’s thirty-year-old car, breaks out a bottle of makgeolli and then another—and then, at dinner, serves him some fine whiskey.