Walk Up (2022)
Directed by Hong Sang-soo
A blustery and overcast Sunday in March. I was left to my own devices and had the grand ambition of cycling the ~17 miles from Pilsen to Skokie. The night before had been one of heavy drinking; a shot and a few cheap beers as I waited for my name to be called for karaoke. It never came and I never sang. But the following morning, I managed to haul my haggard carcass onto my bike. I passed by my old childhood home. A one-bedroom apartment in the Old Irving Park neighborhood, where I lived from 1988 to 2006, until my family was evicted. Rent was $450. My brother and I slept in a red bunk bed in the living room, with a window overlooking the courtyard from the third floor. A mechanic’s body shop was across the street. It’s still there now. The neighborhood has changed, with a new library on the block (my mother would’ve liked it) and townhouses erected in the place of what was a sketchy used car dealership. On my way from school, I would hurry past it, afraid of the barking dog that I feared could slip in between the metal gates. Like quicksand, it’s easy to get lost in the geography of the past.
Hong Sang-soo’s new film Walk Up utilizes the geography of an apartment building as a means to excavate existential anxieties on artistry, the past, the present, and our futures. Like many of Hong’s films, this broadly avant-garde approach is not obviously apparent or clearly defined. It reminded me a bit of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, told on a modest scale. Here, we find filmmaker Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) arriving at his friend’s apartment. Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-Young) gives Byung-soo a tour, discovering the divisions between the artist’s basement, the building restaurant, and the small but ornate attic. What follows is a series of conversations on identity, the artistic self, the real self, and the projected self. These ruminations rarely offer anything conclusive, merely ending on ellipses before we transition to a new scene, where weeks, months, years pass. We see Byung-soo develop a connection with the building’s chef/restaurateur Sunhee (Song Seon-mi). In her, he sees a similar stasis of artistic development. For Sunhee, Byung-soo is at first a curious object of her fixation. Both seek the opposite in each other, fixated with the potential that each one presents. To Sunhee, Byung-soo is an exciting filmmaker. But Byung-soo is tired, ready to resign to a modest life. Byung-soo’s failure to elicit the artistry of Sunhee’s past is a massive disappointment that causes a rift.
I think about the places I used to live. The 18 years in Old Irving Park. Four years in Edgewater. Moving around Lincoln Park in tiny studios, annoyed by DePaul kids in my 20s. The walls all saw the potential of someone moving forward, and I often left a piece of myself in these spaces. Blood smeared in Wicker. The train tracks of Ravenswood. Even when these artistic ambitions seem feckless and bound for nothing, I know I’ve kept on going. Happy that Hong keeps these coming, once or twice a year, to offer solace in reflection. Conversations end on ellipses and soju is better than wine; hard not to appreciate those axioms in my movies.