Yourself and Yours Melbourne International Film Festival  Director: Hong Sang-Soo Stars: Kim Joo-hyuk and Lee You-young Score: ★

FILM REVIEW
By DAMIEN NGUYEN

Every fortnight, my friends and I crack open strange Asian snacks and drinks, and set ourselves up to for a night of bad movies. We’ve cringed at Battlefield Earth and stared aghast at the Star Wars Holiday Special, wondering whether this was a precursor to George Lucas's inane creation of Jar Jar Binks.

A noticeable pattern emerged as we endured through the bad films: poor CGI, awful acting, limited soundtracks, nonsensical plots, and glaring subplots with zero resolution come the closing credits.

Yourself and Yours has much in common with these kinds of movies. It’s slow and tedious to sit through and much of that can be attributed to the poor acting and horrible writing.

The plot is clichéd but with a twist. Youngsoo, a painter, finds himself losing his girlfriend, Minjung, after a fight over a rumour about her spread by his friends. His loss is so severe that he must seek her again, only she has disappeared.

To add to the mystery, women who look exactly like her start to appear and meet other men, who all claim to have some connection to her in their past. However, these women have no memory of such connections.

The premise has promise, but the film is ruined by echoing bad tropes of so many movies before it. Wooden acting fails to play out what little drama is seen on screen and the camera-work can only be described as odd.

Like Battlefield Earth’s bizarre decision to shoot the entire movie on a 45-degree angle, Sang-Soo zooms in on the subjects even when they are not talking or reacting to the conversation. This naturally flies in the face of traditional camerawork for conversation, and the decision to zoom in on random features throughout the film detracts from the immersion.

Characters have little to no development throughout the entire movie. Minjung in particular is an empty female lead. If she is meant to be different characters, Sang-Soo did a poor job of portraying it; the film makes almost no effort to show differences in personalities or hide physical traits.

The ending of the film is also notably disappointing. Nothing is concluded, nothing really happens, and somehow the final line irks rather than concludes.