‘The Day She Returns’ Berlinale Review: Truth in Performance

The whole concept of a junket interview can feel a little bizarre if you’re not part of the journalism world—especially the entertainment press. It’s essentially a format in which, around the release or announcement of a film (or series, album, book—you name it), the people involved sit down for a long string of back-to-back interviews with different outlets. These can be group sessions or one-on-ones, short or extended, filmed on camera or recorded for audio only. Either way, it’s become something of an industry tradition: a format nobody is entirely happy with, but one that helps artists solve the very practical problem of promoting a project to a lot of people in a very short amount of time.

In the new film by Hong Sang-soo, actress Song Sun-mi plays Bae Jeongsu, a performer going through one of these relentless interview marathons—often fielding the same questions from multiple journalists. By current standards, though, this is a fairly relaxed junket: individual interviews, reasonably long, taking place in a warm restaurant setting rather than the usual hotel conference room set up for the occasion. In theory, that kind of environment should allow for slightly more revealing conversations.

What makes Bae’s situation unusual is that she’s been away from the screen for twelve years—we gradually learn she had a daughter during that time and went through a divorce—and is now returning in an independent production. The film is divided into four parts: the first three focus on separate interviews with the actress, each shot in a single take from the exact same camera angle, broken up only by short pauses to catch her breath or step out for a smoke. The fourth episode is best left somewhat mysterious, but broadly speaking it revolves around a theatre class.

Hong’s familiarity with the milieu becomes clear in the way he stages these interviews as mildly uncomfortable conversations with young women who often seem more like fans than journalists (at least in the first two cases), and who end up talking about themselves as much as—or more than—they talk about Bae. Still, in the course of that mutual oversharing, Bae ends up—by her own admission to her assistant—revealing more than she might have intended. The standard promotional questions are all there, but nearly every exchange veers into personal territory: her private life, her relationship with alcohol, her ex-partner, her daughter.

As these conversations unfold, Bae frequently winds up asking more questions than she answers, displaying what may or may not be a carefully rehearsed curiosity about the lives of her interviewers. Song—who has previously worked with Hong on Woman on the Beach, The Day He Arrives, On the Beach at Night Alone, and Walk Up—moves through this terrain with ease, suggesting that even if she thinks she’s oversharing, she ultimately knows exactly what she’s doing and how to control what she says (or withholds). Interestingly, the film shares quite a bit with Everything Else is Noise by Nicolás Pereda—not just in its formal minimalism, but in its focus on an interview with an artist and the carefully prepared responses that may or may not correspond to the truth.

Unlike other Hong films that lean more directly on real-life parallels, there’s no obvious overlap here between actress and character. In fact, if you were to interview Song herself, her life story would likely be far more dramatic than anything suggested in the film. What’s really at stake here is the actress’s self-perception: how she constructs a narrative about herself, how she leans on verbal tics and familiar phrases, and above all how everything starts to feel like just another performance—every bit as rehearsed as the one she gives in the film she’s promoting. In that sense, the fourth episode becomes particularly revealing, exposing the gap between what’s rehearsed and what’s sincere, between what’s convenient and what’s true—those moments that slip past calculation.

The Day She Returns ultimately becomes a reflection on the nature of performance—that everyday “acting” we all engage in when we step into public life, whether or not we’re professionals. It involves Song, certainly, but also the people she encounters, who often end up talking more about themselves than about her. Hong zeroes in on those flashes of truth that escape careful planning, the doubt that seeps into even the most calculated expression, the awkward silence or unplanned pause that can’t be rehearsed—because sometimes you simply don’t know what comes next, and there isn’t always a script to consult. With minimal means—a handful of actors, fewer than a dozen shots, and just four days of shooting—the Korean filmmaker once again pokes around in the mysteries of art, and in the unexpected ways it connects back to real life.