On the lam for cannabis possession, a bumbling middle-aged painter—Sung-nam, played by actor and punk vocalist Kim Yeong-ho—escapes his deadlocked life in Seoul for the hedonistic, indulgent freedoms of Paris. In the City of Lights, he encounters not cosmopolitan safety or artistic (re)awakening so much as generalized alienation and an ambience of existential dread. “You here … be careful,” a comically ominous Frenchman advises Sung-nam at the airport in what is one of Hong Sangsoo’s zaniest opening acts. “It’s lonely here, but it’s better not to meet anybody. The people here don’t know what circumstances they’re in,” the émigré later ruminates on Europeans. Night and Day is something of a nomadic picaresque, observing the anxious (yet audacious) impressionist as he fumbles his sorry way through a self-invented obstacle course of flirtation, intoxication and emotional deceit. The action—culminating in Sung-nam’s return to South Korea after another momentous lie— is punctuated by a matter-of-fact internal voiceover and the ecstatic allegretto of Beethoven’s 7th, a rare use of wildly triumphant music for the director. The first of three Hong undertakings set in France, Night and Day unravels self-exile in its full interpersonal ambiguity, yet it also furnishes a remarkably honest, even vulnerable episodic snapshot of life and love in the diaspora.