This is probably the time Hong Sang-soo has been closest to setting foot in Vila do Conde, which already says a lot about the magnificent film by Toru Takano. Except for their countries of origin (Takano is Japanese, Sang-soo South Korean), not much more separates Takano’s film from the Korean master. The first, however, never falls into some kind of plagiarism but instead knows how to work, delicately and intuitively, with the material at his disposition, making a lot from (apparently) little, just like Sang-soo. It is so in the architecture of the mise-en-scène, in the composition of the characters (the protagonist’s simultaneously disastrous and friendly melancholy), in the economy of the sets and in the primary colours – all in all, in the humour always tinged with a gloomy gravity (and with the effects of alcohol, almost a character in itself in Sang-soo’s films). The film shares, in particular, its summer-holiday hue with "In Another Country" (2012), although in this chapter the literary, short-story nature of the film, as well as the youth and romance atmosphere in the middle of the "summer holidays" also bring to memory a film like "A Summer’s Tale" (1997) by Éric Rohmer, who is not by accident one of Sang-soo’s major authorial influences. One of the great films not to miss in this edition. (FN)