The awkward male specimens depicted in Hong Sang-soo’s dramas are not models of good behavior. They look respectably unassuming, but a convivial night on the town often yields slurred confessions over dinner, slapdowns of friends, and courtships that tilt toward begging or flying leaps. As these young men navigate (or aggravate) the love triangles and other consequences of their actions, the Korean director of six such features never seems to lose his rigorous interest.

“Woman on the Beach,” which opens today at Film Forum and screened at the 2006 New York Film Festival, features another in this line of men. A slumping filmmaker coaxes his friend into spending a weekend by the water, and the friend brings along his singer girlfriend. The ensuing romantic entanglements lack the bite of Mr. Hong’s previous films, but the messy give-and-take of desire, spread as usual across a few days amid Rohmeresque quotidian incident, remains as sensitively observed as ever, and often cringingly funny.

Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) pitches the trip as a script-writing retreat, but by the time the trio reaches the bland bungalows under gray skies, the young director is officially distracted by his friend’s companion, Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-joung). Bespectacled Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo) is reduced to a distant second fiddle, and picks a fight over his friend’s outburst at a shiftless waiter. Joong-rae confirms the new situation: The level of suavity here is such that he simply asks Moon-sook which suitor she prefers.

The answer is that she spends the night with Joong-rae, but a few days later he’s alone and adrift at the resort, and so begins one of Mr. Hong’s mirrored second acts. Joong-rae buttonholes two young women vacationing together, ostensibly to interview them for material, and soon enough he is leaning into Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi), primly pretty and the more forthcoming of the two. Something about her reminds him of Moon-sook, or at least allows him to soften the post-fling landing and work out his restlessness.

Mr. Hong’s movies often retrace plotlines or even revisit scenes from a different character’s perspective. “Woman on the Beach” is a more straightforward production, doubling back simply with Moon-sook’s unexpected return to the beach. She hears about Joong-rae’s rapid fling and, like any good Hong rejectee, gets drunk, ultimately parking herself at their bungalow door. The male-female-male triangle of the film’s first half is inverted, with Joongrae now caught between two women and tripping over himself to explain.

The movie’s encounters play out against the spare, overcast environs of the beachside houses, bereft of activity and visitors in the off-season, and peculiarly suited for isolating and exploring the characters’ travails. Mr. Hong’s visual sense is as carefully composed as his narrative, and he pays close attention to blocking and framing, stranding his characters together against sandy expanses, bare roadsides, and spartan rooms.

Probably the biggest downside to “Woman on the Beach” (besides the cutesy piano interludes) is the consistency of Mr. Hong’s milieu: Even if you haven’t seen his previous movies, you might have limited patience for the hormonal blundering of this affable but self-involved main character. But the neat seesaw toward Moon-sook’s viewpoint near the end compensates, especially since she doesn’t behave much better.

Joong-rae is even somewhat redeemed when he lays bare his theory of perception and personality in a memorable scene with Moon-sook. He scrawls a fearsome diagram to demonstrate how incompletely we view one another at any given time, though this dubious flash of awareness doesn’t necessarily lead to self-knowledge. (An almost amusing footnote to the movie’s conclusion is that, after the shambles of the weekend’s affairs, Joong-rae churns out a screenplay after all.)

Mr. Hong has been more pitiless in his depiction of male flailing in the past, but the possibility of casual human cruelty comes through in a subplot about the treatment of a dog by strangers encountered on the beach. It’s the kind of shift in perspective that elevates Mr. Hong’s films above fetishizing the very behavior they claim to dissect, by providing a window on the behavior of others that’s often more of a mirror.

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