In this year's Busan festival opener, director Kim Jong-kwan assembles a starry cast for a quartet of romantic interludes set in the same Seoul coffee shop, but the concept overpowers the stories themselves. An artisanal café in a quiet yet fashionable Seoul neighborhood provides the setting for a quartet of seasonal vignettes in Kim Jong-kwan’s romantic anthology “The Table: Day and Night.” Opening this year’s Busan Film Festival, the film — with its star-studded ensemble including Kim Min-ha, Shim Eun-kyung and Han Sun-hwa — will ensure a glitzy curtain-raiser for South Korea’s premier cinematic event, but beyond this high-profile debut, Kim’s frothy, fitfully engaging effort will likely be met with a muted response further afield, limited only to specialist Asian showcases. An expansion of the director’s 2016 effort, “The Table,” which saw four different couples meet for coffee at the same table, in the same café, over the course of a single day, “The Table: Day and Night” is similarly constructed around four chance encounters that take place at a single, stylish coffeehouse.
This time the meetups are spread across a number of weeks, as the summer heat cools gently into autumn, while the interludes themselves attempt to broach something more complex than simple relationship woes. The first chapter, titled “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” details the fairytale meeting between two customers, Hyeon-oh (Joo Jong-hyuk), a young man with a passion for rebuilding old watches, and Yoo-jin (Kim Min-ha), a forlorn dreamer, whose inherited antique timepiece has not worked in years. In the third story, “T.P.A.,” successful web novelist Hye-jin (Shim Eun-kyung) is wooed by Dong-nam (Lee Hee-jun), a passionate filmmaker who pleads for her permission to adapt one of her most popular works for the big screen, while in the final tale, an aspiring pop idol, Nakyung (Jeon So-young) and her childhood boyfriend Jong-su (Kim Dong-hwi) discuss the fate of their adolescent relationship.
Kim has grown steadily in stature within the industry, since his acclaimed 2004 short “How to Operate a Polaroid Camera.” He has contributed to a number of anthologies and omnibuses, including the Netflix project “Persona” (2019) and the Hemingway-inspired crime collection “The Killers” (2024), while many of his feature films, such as “Worst Woman” (2016) and “Frosted Window” (2025), are likewise structured around a series of loosely connected vignettes. He is clearly drawn to telling stories in snapshots, and exploring characters through fleeting moments and passing interactions. The perpetually populated tables of a busy urban eatery provide the perfect setting for these micro-dramas to play out, while lending a narrative consistency to the piece as a whole, even as the tone of each tale is allowed to flail wildly from the implausible to the pragmatic, the fantastical to the flirtatious.
Never allowing the action to bleed beyond the boundaries of the establishment, Kim invites the suggestion that the café itself plays cupid to those that chance to cross its threshold — a notion made all the more plausible when novelist Hye-jin begins casually concocting a workplace romance from her own imagination, between the café’s ever-present baristas. As is true throughout Kim’s work, the women prove infinitely more interesting protagonists than their male counterparts. Kim Min-ha, a familiar face to many from her work on Apple TV’s “Pachinko,” is given little opportunity to shine in a segment that promises much, but leaves its potential unexplored.
Shim (last seen in Sho Miyake’s Locarno winner “Two Seasons, Two Strangers”) portrays Hye-jin as a formidable artist, confident in her vision and stature within a male-dominated industry, even when she allows Dong-nam’s charm offensive to gain ground. Han’s Sang-mi is a similarly captivating presence onscreen, a bundle of nervous energy on the brink of exploding, captured brilliantly by one of Korea’s most consistently versatile emerging talents. Master DP Kim Ji-yong, the man responsible for such ravishing visual delights as Park Chan-wook’s “Decision to Leave” and Lee Chang-dong’s current awards player “Possible Love,” shoots this hipster hideaway together with Lee Ju-yeon, in warm, inviting hues that come close to conjuring the scent of freshly roasted beans.
The walls are decorated in eye-catching oil paintings of enigmatic, forlorn individuals who compose themselves in much the same manner as the café’s real clientele. Whether these portraits represent past patrons, whose stories once unspooled over these same steaming cups, Kim declines to comment. One can’t help but feel, as the film closes with a montage of empty, inviting tables, that he is a storyteller more interested in the potential of this space to host endless fascinating characters, dramas and romances from one moment to the next, than in actually doing justice to the ones he has brought to life.
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