This film won the Golden Leopard (Best Film award) at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival. By mistake, a film director arrives in a town a day early to attend a screening of one of his films. With time to kill, he strikes up a conversation with an aspiring painter who he meets in a temple and they spend the rest of the day together. Although he finds her attractive, she is considerably younger than him and neither of them are particularly outgoing. A bit like Sliding Doors or Kieslowski's Blind Chance, the film splits into two different versions of what happens over the next 24 hours but, unlike those two films, the outcome depends not so much on chance but on how the main character chooses to behave. Any further info would inevitably contain spoilers so let's just say that it reminded me of some of Erich Roemer's films and is a sort of moral tale. Whether or not you will like Right Now, Wrong Then will probably depend on what you think of the dialogue, which pretty much dominates (there is not much action and little in the way of visuals or soundtrack). In my view, it is almost a really good film but the script needed sharpening up, as my attention started wandering off more than once. Perhaps a bit more humour and a slightly faster pace would have helped, However, it is a thought-provoking film and I found it ultimately satisfying when it ended, which is why I give it 7/10.

Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of two distinct halves. In 2 days of the life of a filmmaker, Ham Cheon-soo, in town a day early for a screening of his latest work at a local film festival. He meets a younger woman, Yoon Hee-Jeong, and immediately falls for her. She's an artist, and he views and comments on her work, then they go out to dinner where they drunkenly bear their souls. It results in an invitation to a friend's small party where a revelation embarrasses Ham to the point where they part ways on a sour note. He attends his film to a small crowd, conducts a hungover Q&A, and retires, walking away from the town for good. Roll title card "Right Now" rather than "Right Then." The film literally repeats from the beginning, erasing the first half. Like Groundhog Day but only a once-over, we get every scene again but from a slightly different wishful approach.

This second time the couple are honest, unlike the first time where Ham tries too hard to impress and Yoon retreats. Again, they fall in love, but given Ham admits to already being married, their feelings are mutual and emotional without being sexual. He may embarrass himself once more at the aforementioned dinner, but it does not result in a cruel parting, instead drawing them closer. It's a quaint experiment given the relaxed tone. The first half on its own is not a movie, and neither is the second. They're co-dependent to give the narrative meaning, but it's far from cinematic in tone. It's a filmmaker's revisionism of what could have been a perfect evening had the characters acted suitably. It's honest, rather than romantic – though the chemistry still bubbles in the air – and it's utterly bittersweet, in a similar vein to Before Sunrise, but strictly not Before Sunset.

It's my first film from Korean director Hong Sang-soo and ostensibly from his fans and critics, Right Now Wrong Then is firmly his style – including the Woody Allen-esque romance between an older creative similar to the director himself, and a pretty younger woman. The atmosphere is very modest with simple photography, though Sang-soo does punctuate some scenes with careful zooms. It's very easy-going filmmaking, and its concept makes the second half easier to watch because you know exactly where it's heading as it retraces steps while you have a sharp eye out for the subtle changes that make all the differences, but it doesn't beg you to keep an eye on every detail. Those differences aren't grandstanding though the narrative is clearly motivated by them. Sometimes a scene will repeat its approach entirely despite the previous scene being radically revised. It's trying to be very nuanced rather than having a 'sliding doors/butterfly effect' where causality makes the universe shift places.

Instead, the outcome isn't much different but the overall feeling is utterly converted. It's all down to the performances of its two leads, Jeong Jae-Yeong and Kim Min-Hee, to create that tone with their chemistry, who were most likely shooting both halves back to back, location by location. In both halves, Ham is still a jerk with a kind of irritating laugh, but all the characters are deeply human even if Sang-soo doesn't peel back their layers every time. There's a big heart buried in its very slight execution. However, Right Now Wrong Then is not necessarily about how honesty is a better policy – though Ham's harsh analysis of Hee-Jeong's art in the second half remains a sting that takes a long time to settle – but it's about how it's possible to love again. In this case, love doesn't have to be a complete turbulous affair, but it can still be a fulfilling and life-affirming night if approached accordingly.

8/10

A meta-meet-cute diptych from the prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN is set within two days and one night in the town of Suwon, an acclaimed art house filmmaker, Ham Cheon-soo (Jeong) is scheduled to give a lecture before the screening of his latest work, but he arrives one day earlier, and serendipity leads him fall in with Yoon Hee-jeong (Kim), a local young painter inside a Buddhist temple.

Struck by coup de foudre, Cheon-soo tentatively asks Hee-jeong for coffee together, and she eventually agrees (on the pretense that what an honor to be accosted by such a famed directer). Chronologically from the coffee shop, to her atelier, then a sushi diner until a small gathering with Hee-jeong's friends in the night, the pair begins to know better of each other through their courteous small-talk and it is sheer in Hong's wheelhouse when he patiently employs static frames and long-takes (with sonorous music cues) to elicit the polite but tangible awkwardness between two strangers shaping up an incipient acquaintance, constantly using racking focus to point up every subtle variation of their emotions (which leans more towards Hee-jeong since she is the reactive one in the courtship), and also on the strength of two leading players' deceptively ad-libbing naturalism, consequentially, it creates an ensorcelling aura in defiance of the banal pleasantries as if we were watching a situation which would actualizes itself the next morning in front of our own eyes.

When the evening ends with an anticlimactic revelation and Cheon-soo is assailed by hangover and gall during his lecture the morning after, the movie starts anew, right in the midstream and we are miraculously transferred back to the beginning and what we have watched hitherto is expunged, but with the fresh foreknowledge in our head, to watching the same narrative panning out ex nihilo but in a slightly different trajectory is a mesmerizing process, not the least if we are intrigued to discern their behavioral niceties.

In the second round, Cheon-soo modulates his insincere propriety into an attitude larded with more honesty, both about his genuine feelings to Hee-jeong and to her artwork, no gobbledygook trying to patronizing her, his blunt opinion might be a flea in her ear, but in its own merit, it at least proves to her that he is not a pseud as in the first half. Also Cheon-soo reveals his marriage status in the diner sequences, where Jeong Jae-yeong tops off the protracted long-take with a stirring confession that mounts to a tremendous tour-de-force in this reviewer's eyes. How many times one can experience that sensational feeling of falling in love so completely and helplessly, to those entrapped in the insensate impasse of middle-age, which becomes a blossoming opportunity they can hardly decline. It is more telling and ironic that Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee actually precipitate an extramarital affair ignited by their first collaboration, and therefore she has become his muse both in his fiction work and in real life.

The second half (now) redresses what goes awry in the first one (then), and it reaches a warm and earnest coda, where Cheon-soo successfully lures her into watching his film, because up to that point, Hee-jeong has never watched any of them, a leg-pull of Hong's own repute as an internationally celebrated name whose filmography is more heard in circulation than actually being watched by the common herd.

Unpretentiously accessibly and tipsily lifelike, by and large Hong Sang-soo's RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN is a prepossessing conversation piece with an ingenious conceptual wheeze which cogently puts him on the map for cinephiles all around the globe.