The central figure of Hong Sang-soo's new film Night and Day, like most of the director's artist-type protagonists, is a pretentious buffoon. Intelligent only in his ability to co-opt other peoples' opinions, Korean painter Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) has fled to Paris after getting ratted out over smoking marijuana with some friends. At night, he cries on the phone to his smart, loving wife about how he misses her -- but he is soon bumping into ex-girlfriends and lusting after students, adrift in Paris with a massive ego and sans a paying job.

Commissioned by the same program that brought Hou Hsiao-hsien to France for his sublime Flight of the Red Balloon and funded Olivier Assayas' masterful Summer Hours, Night and Day accomplishes two things that have long been prognosticated for this young, immensely talented filmmaker's career: First, it brings him to the country that many have called his artistic touchstone. Hong has often been called South Korea's answer to Eric Rohmer, and it's easy to see why: His films are behavioral studies that pivot around absurdly minor actions, characterized by scenes of people shamelessly bullshitting about art and love.

After beginning his life on the lam by flirting with old flame Min-seon (Kim Yu-jin), another painter who is now married to a folklorist, Seong-nam eventually takes up with a pair of young roommates. One, Hyeon-ju (Seo Min-jeong), is an art student looking to become a teacher in Seoul one day; the other, Yu-jeong (Park Eun-hye), is an unstable, plagiarizing ex-student who only warms to Seong-nam after Hyeon-ju admits she wants to date him. Naturally, Seong-nam becomes infatuated with the latter.

Having solidified his formal grasp with last year's Woman on the Beach, Hong has widened his ambitions here: Over the course of its 145 minutes, the film touches on such diverse subjects as religion, North Korea, and the world of dreams. "Literary" is an adjective often used to describe Hong's films -- one of his best jokes involves a hotel Seong-nam stays at named after the author of Madame Bovary -- but Night and Day is the first one I've seen that can truly be called novelistic.

This is an important work from a formidable artist; a complex, self-reflexive travelogue that contemplates the chaos of total freedom, and the indifference of the male ideal to that chaos. Praising Yu-jeong's hijacked art projects, Seong-nam talks about how clichés are repeated and begin to poison people, hilariously unaware that he himself has become one such cliché. The brilliance of Night and Day is how Sang-soo studies and enlists these clichés while his film consistently defies them.

Aka Bam gua nat.