Hong Sangsoo

[therewillbeblus]

I'm trying to plan my Melbourne International Film Festival schedule and deciding between seeing In Front of Your Face or The Novelist's Film – which one should I prioritise? I can see there's already a strong vote for the first from twbb.

I don't like either, but yes, avoid the latest film if you can

[Michael Kerpan]

TWBB -- you are making me very eager to see this. But I suspect it will be a year or so before I get a chance.

[therewillbeblus]

Not sure if you're joking or not since I don't like either - or if we just misalign our recent Hong tastes so inversely-in(out-of?)-sync that it's a safe bet you'll like them! - but feel free to PM me if you want to see them before then

[Michael Kerpan]

TWBB -- I haven't genuinely disliked any of the Hong films I've seen so far. I may love some and only moderately like others -- but I have never had the intensely adverse reactions to any that you have had to at least some.

[therewillbeblus]

I know, I just thought it was funny how you phrased that, placing me as an agent driving your eagerness to see these movies when I'm trashing them

[Michael Kerpan]

At least partly a joke... But also I am curious to see whether I can find a clue as to why these are so much less appealing to you (regardless of whether I react negatively myself).

[DarkImbecile]

Trailer for Walk Up, premiering at TIFF

[ryannichols7]

confirmed that The Novelist's Film and Walk Up will be at NYFF, US debuts for both, and both distributed by Cinema Guild

good time to be a Hong fan, you really never have to worry about his work seeing some form of distribution or home video release. In Another Country aside...and yes I will keep beating this horse

[ryannichols7]

당신 얼굴 앞에서 (In Front of Your Face / dangsin eolgul ap-eseo) [2021] | Cinema Guild (available 25 October 2022)

소설가의 영화 (The Novelist's Film / Soseolgaui Yeonghwa) [2022] | Cinema Guild (coming soon; currently open in some countries, NA "debut" at NYFF)

워크 업 (Walk Up / wokeu-eob) [2022] | Cinema Guild (coming soon; world debut at TIFF/NYFF)

some updates! hoping for some info on "older" releases soon for year's end

EDIT: I have seen conflicting Korean titles on Walk Up, using both the transliteration and also 탑 (tap/b) which means "tower" - since this will obviously get a Cinema Guild release its not as pressing to have as the ones for the older films, but my OCD/completionist tendencies would love if I could settle this one ASAP. any insight is appreciated!

[justeleblanc]

다른 나라에서 (In Another Country / Dareun naraeseo) [2012] | DS Media Korea (w/ Nobody's Daughter Haewon) [update 12 Jul 2022: Kino supposedly not interested in rereleasing film]

Is there a source for Kino's lack of interest in this one? I'm not doubting it, but am curious to finding out more/why and if it means it might find its way to another label.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

EDIT: I have seen conflicting Korean titles on Walk Up, using both the transliteration and also 탑 (tap/b) which means "tower" - since this will obviously get a Cinema Guild release its not as pressing to have as the ones for the older films, but my OCD/completionist tendencies would love if I could settle this one ASAP. any insight is appreciated!

Sorry I didn't see this earlier, but the Korean title is 탑 (which does mean "tower" but is also a homophone for "top," something I'm sure Hong knows and is deliberately playing on). I'm pretty sure the transliterated title was an unofficial one used after the initial TIFF lineup announcement, when the English title was the only one out there.

[ryannichols7]

다른 나라에서 (In Another Country / Dareun naraeseo) [2012] | DS Media Korea (w/ Nobody's Daughter Haewon) [update 12 Jul 2022: Kino supposedly not interested in rereleasing film]

Is there a source for Kino's lack of interest in this one? I'm not doubting it, but am curious to finding out more/why and if it means it might find its way to another label.

straight from the source. I'm sure either of the other labels would love to put it out

EDIT: I have seen conflicting Korean titles on Walk Up, using both the transliteration and also 탑 (tap/b) which means "tower" - since this will obviously get a Cinema Guild release its not as pressing to have as the ones for the older films, but my OCD/completionist tendencies would love if I could settle this one ASAP. any insight is appreciated!

Sorry I didn't see this earlier, but the Korean title is 탑 (which does mean "tower" but is also a homophone for "top," something I'm sure Hong knows and is deliberately playing on). I'm pretty sure the transliterated title was an unofficial one used after the initial TIFF lineup announcement, when the English title was the only one out there.

perfect, thank you and that's exactly what I was thinking - Introduction threw me off since that one really did end up just being a transliteration! it's a very clever title that I wish had some sort of equivalent in English

[Michael Kerpan]

In Front of Your Face finally arrived from Cinema Guild today. So I watched it this evening. Perhaps because of personal circumstances, I found a lot of resonance with the situation of the protagonist. I think this was Hong's first film centered on an "old" female protagonist (though Hotel By the River featured an elderly male one). The tightrope walking she does between past and (not appealing future) -- and her attempt to stay focused on the beauty of the "present" is something I can very much appreciate. I also thought this was an especially visually lovely Hong film. If I were to rate this, I'd put in my list of Hong's A-level films (meaning "loved with no real reservations").

[togg]

The Novelist's Film is the best film of 2022 for me. I can't wait to see the last one and I hope that I will have even one more in Berlin next month.

[therewillbeblus]

Would love to hear a defense of In Water by the Hong-acolytes here, as I think it's his worst film yet. I can't conceive of a single angle from which to admire this one - Hong switches things up with almost exclusively out-of-focus shots (cool?) but his banal "Rohmeresque" convos don't infuse any rich subtleties of emotion or inferred dynamics into them, as he usually invokes at least a few times even in his weakest work. The most interesting part of this film is when someone talks about wanting to head-butt a ghost, and there's nothing cute or funny about it, nor does it signify rapport. It's just.. something different

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm sure it will be at lest a year before I manage to see In Water, so I'll see then...

[zedz]

someone talks about wanting to head-butt a ghost

You've probably just landed this on a bunch of must-see lists.

[therewillbeblus]

I almost spoiler-box'd it because it's the only part of the movie that's memorable

[barbarella satyricon]

Been dragging my feet to posting about Hong's latest two, Walk Up and In Water, because they were, if not entirely dispiriting, then definitely underwhelming and, for the specific technical detail mentioned by twbb above, also confounding.

To get In Water out of the way for now, I went into a screening with precisely zero knowledge of anything about it. So when the images on the screen never seemed to go into focus, it took a while for me to find my bearings and not go flagging down a theater employee. Two clues that sorted me out in this matter until after the screening, when I was able to confirm that this actually was a conscious choice on Hong's part: that while the opening shots were out of focus, the title and credits text was not; that an early scene/shot with the three leads eating and drinking in the living room was relatively in focus.

That's a lot of preamble to say that there wasn't much to find compelling in the film. I did perk up at Kim Min-Hee's name in the opening credits, but that was for a song credit, and she doesn't make an actual appearance on-camera.

News outlets in South Korea have been reporting Hong and Kim's parting ways since early this year. In a moment of trying to make heads or tails of this film's visual strategy, I wondered if this was supposed to be the director's subjective view, eyes swimming with tears, the way ahead muddled, awash. As mawkish as that sounds, it still isn't completely unconvincing to me (the moment with the aforementioned song might be another clue), and somewhat more convincing than the simplistic reading that the protagonists' lack of focus and vision in their filmmaking project is what is being represented.

At least from The Novelist's Film onward, I've felt that Hong's films were more and more like exercises. Watching this festival press conference for that film confirmed that sense for me –

SpoilerShow

that it was the film within the film, the sequence in color, that was the starting point, an already filmed piece, that inspired and germinated the surrounding narrative that was then constructed around it, basically the reverse order-of-action of the film's plot. That's what the film felt like – an attempt based on an inspiration, an idea – which, in a looped-back way, is also the novelist's own approach in her perhaps dilettantish side project.

The recent films can be read as discreetly metatextual, then, although that element was already present in other ways in other of Hong's earlier films. In Walk Up, Kwon Hae-Hyo's director character sits in a small fine-dining restaurant with its owner and with the owner of the building, and he talks about his approach to filmmaking, how he consciously eschews the fantastical or the imaginary in favor of the realistic, the mundane. He could very well be talking about the film in which he is a character, in the way that it plays out, in its own self-limited way.

Similarly, In Front of Your Face also features extended conversation about the characters' philosophies on and approaches to filmmaking. Then, certain other moments – the walk in the rain through the alleyway, for instance, or the character's intense contemplation of her sleeping sister's face – seem to be demonstrating those expressed purposes and methods.

With the last two films, and with The Novelist's Film too, it's felt a bit like filmmaking for filmmaking's sake. That sounds more disheartening than I would have thought, considering all the hours of beguiling, crafty, even ingenious cinema Hong has given us. My impressions are a bit scattered and unfocused some months after viewings, so I'll follow up with another post about acting and acting styles in the recent films.

[barbarella satyricon]

Here's Lee Hye-Young receiving a Best Actress award for In Front of Your Face at the 58th Baeksang Arts Awards last year (which looks to have been a very scaled-back affair with the then-ongoing pandemic). Her acceptance speech includes some gracious words about her positive experience working on the film. (The linked video has captions in English.)

After I saw In Front of Your Face during its first run, I was so impressed by this performance by an actor of whom I had had no previous knowledge that I did a quick internet search which brought up, as expected, results almost all in Korean. After some random clicking and tinkering with online translators, I was able to learn, from reading an interview, that from what Lee had seen of Hong's films prior to working with him, she was decidedly not a fan, that she found them too casual, off-the-cuff, lacking serious intent. (I'm paraphrasing, of course, from a rough translation, and from memory, of an article I likely wouldn't be able to track down again now.)

She also says that what she herself looks for in film and in art is fantasy, the imaginative, the mysterious, which seems to be, in hindsight, in direct opposition to what Kwon Hae-Hyo's character says in Walk Up, as recalled in my previous post.

I think that Lee's difference of view and approach, as abstract and intangible as that may be, plays at least some small vital part in the tension and aliveness that she brings to In Front of Your Face, a work that still feels to me like an outlier in Hong's oeuvre, maybe something like a genuine collaboration between two artists on distinctly different wavelengths. In the two other Hong films that Lee appears in after this one, it feels like she has been somewhat co-opted into the director's more usual tropes, and I don't think this diminishes her stature as a performer so much as it does the vitality of Hong's filmmaking, the potential for variation and dynamic discovery.

The opening section of The Novelist's Film, for instance, had me rather hopefully (and wrongheadedly) thinking that maybe Hong was steering his ship into some Rivette-like waters: the moody, darkly shaded monochrome image, the hole-in-the-wall bookstore-café setting, a milieu for poets and day drinkers, the cagey female novelist who seems to have some compulsive, superstitious attachment to her gloves... It felt, at first sight, like the film might be going into some tricky and intriguing places with mysteries and conspiracies to unravel (actually, as an aside, Virgin Stripped Bare had that very feeling for me, and in a sustained way), so it was distinctly disappointing when it then just went the way of warmed-over industry-people satire and the usual comedy of social discomfort.

When Kwon Hae-Hyo, as yet another director character, first walks into a shot a little into that film, several audience members in the small but packed screening room where I saw it broke into knowing laughter. Uh oh, bad sign, was what I thought, for both actor and director. The character type has become as ubiquitous as the soju bottles once were.

In Walk Up, I felt that Kwon also had too actorly a persona and presence to bring off a role I understood as, at least in parts and pieces, a Hong stand-in. The director's two female conversation partners flatter him extravagantly, remarking on his surprising personal magnetism, basically (to use that loaded word from the other film) his charisma, and I sensed that either we were supposed to be seeing through their disingenuous talk or that the actor was just not stacked up to the part. Maybe both. In a later scene, Kwon's character relates, to a different female companion, an experience of having seen God, and, again, it was hard to tell whether we were supposed to sense a shiftless character hardly believing his own yarns or if it was the actor himself not quite bringing it off.

It's a drag writing at length about films that one hasn't enjoyed, but maybe it was the glimmers of unexplored potential in some of these recent ones that have kept me ruminating (and now writing) for as long as I have. As with the writers' bookstore hangout in The Novelist's Film, the walk-up building and live-and-work spaces that give the film its Korean title, Ok-Tab (literally "rooftop"), are settings redolent of a tastefully bohemian, artistic existence, evocatively appointed spaces that might be shown to have as much character and history as the human personalities in the film do.

Hong, or at least his location scouts, always had an eye for hidden-away little stations and establishments possessing their own unique poetic interiority. If he were ever to start work on some sprawling and/or meandering Seoul-based film, maybe even a serial, incorporating all that he knows and senses into some intuitive and fluid network of crisscrossing associations... Well, that's just wishful thinking, and at this point, I'd still be lining up for whatever new thing he has coming up, ever more formally obtuse and narratively slighter film-exercises included, just as a matter of course.

[togg]

Hong made very clear that the focus choice is not that relevant, in general these stilistic choices rarelly are. What matters is the character desires, which is where the focus of the movie lays. There's a protagonist that struggles to find satysfying shots, he looks for symbols. Then he falls in love and discovers cinema. It's a beautifull story.

[Michael Kerpan]

I got the new BluRay of Novelist's Film from Cinema Guild -- and I have to ay I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Yes, it was pretty "aimless" overall, but I found it pleasurable throughout. And I found the black and white cinematography pretty gorgeous overall -- one of the best looking recent b&w films I've seen (in terms of sheer appearance). Sorry to hear that later films might be less appealing (out of focus throughout -- not sure I could handle this) -- and also sad to hear the HSS-KIM Min-hee artistic (and personal) partnership has ended.

[togg]

Sorry to hear that later films might be less appealing (out of focus throughout -- not sure I could handle this) -- and also sad to hear the HSS-KIM Min-hee artistic (and personal) partnership has ended.

In Water is not less appealing at all. It's a very touching story. Also they are still together

[barbarella satyricon]

There looks to be a spate of Korean blu ray releases of some of the recent Hongs – Introduction, The Woman Who Ran, In Front of Your Face, The Novelist's Film – all from Nova Media, with apparently others lined up as well. That they list English subtitles might not be such a selling point as these releases are just now catching up to Cinema Guild's very fine editions, with far fewer extras and less interesting art and design. I only wonder what took so long to get these to the Korean market.

Hong's latest to get a theatrical run here, In Our Day, felt for me like a solid three-star movie – whether that's on a four or five star scale, it just has the feel of a three-star film, if that makes any kind of sense, with maybe half a star docked if one hasn't particularly liked any of Hong's latest half-dozen or so.

The image is back in focus, for one thing, if I could harp on that for another second. And the screenplay has a more apparent structure this time round, perhaps even conventional-seeming in the way motifs and themes are repeated and rhymed across the back-and-forth narratives, the two separate stories that make up the "day in the life" of the title.

The closing shot is also thematically on-the-nose in a way I can't remember seeing in any other Hong film:

SpoilerShow

basically that life is short, so enjoy its pleasures while you can, with gratitude, without hangups.

The film succeeds, in my view, as a casual study of small, subtle conflicts that arise in daily life and its interactions. These passing, incidental conflicts are highlighted in their isolated moments, like small clauses or asides within the mostly laidback slice-of-life drama, and I found this rhythm made for an enjoyable and memorable viewing from moment to moment and scene to scene.

For one, it was good to see/hear the older, professionally established characters react against some of the foibles of their young admirers. Most recently, I've sometimes felt my heart sink at the arrival onscreen of some of these now very familiar faces and types in the latest Hong films, the young adulators and strivers, hero-worshippers and hangers-on, obsequious in the extreme, self-abnegating, but then suddenly touchy and obtuse in obscure personal ways. I just came to assume that Hong must have so many of these in his own personal and professional orbit that he can't help but have them turn up in his films.

Kim Seung-Yun is the fresh face here (could hardly make out her taekwondo demonstration in In Water, much less her face), differentiated from her more sullen, skittish peers in her seemingly unflappable cheerfulness. But she's given a quick rap of reproof from Ki Joo-Bong in a later scene in this film, with a sudden flareup of annoyance on the aging poet's part. The moment is both uncomfortable and satisfying in ways that are, if not dramatically profound, then just humanly interesting.

Kim Min-Hee's character also makes a dig at her aspiring-actor cousin, this to her friend, Song Seon-Mi's character, in the cousin's absence, following a rather humorous bit with very spicy ramyun noodles. I found such moments lent the film a more spontaneously alive and recognizably true-to-life feeling.

Kim Min-Hee's actress and Ki Joo-Bong's poet are the characters whose occupations and approaches to their artistry become the topic of much of the film's conversations and exchanges. It's frankly refreshing to have a Hong film without an embattled, beleaguered, or shiftless director character, only the very chipper Kim Seung-Yun who spends a good amount of time here capturing content on her camcorder.

And continuing, perhaps, in the often reflexive aspect of the recent Hong films, as I've read it, Kim Min-Hee delivers an extended passage of dialogue, almost a monologue in the presence of the intently listening cousin, about observations and personal decisions she has made concerning the business of acting, the larger industry itself and also the craft, her craft. Not unlike what I thought I perceived in Lee Hye-Young's performance, in a more sustained way, in In Front of Your Face, I felt I saw Kim's very presence and being undergo a nearly imperceptible but definite change onscreen as she spoke. It would be easy to read real-life biographical details into the things Kim says here, but as an act of self-revelation through performance – revealing to yet again change and conceal – I just found it a quietly remarkable and distinctly moving bit of screen acting.

I have no idea if Hong and Kim are still a couple, and I guess there's no reason for that to be important. Perhaps they had a brief break, or wouldn't it be possible anyways to maintain professional and artistic ties even while having dissolved previous personal partnerships? In any case, I'll be careful not to be credulous of online news (gossip) from unverified sources, especially when so much of it these days seems to be generated via prompts and layers of passes through AI.

So, just solidly positive on In Our Day, which feels, in its balance of structure and spontanaeity, like something that could play on afternoon cable TV and be drawing in a viewership of those who would have had no previous interest in seeing a Hong Sang-Soo joint through to the end. Three stars, then, to say this one might have sleeper hit potential, whatever that might mean in this steadfastly low-key context.

[Michael Kerpan]

Watched the Cinema Guild release of Walk Up. The black and white cinematography in this struck me as quite attractive. I felt the portrayal of the director here was pretty rueful and lacerating (in a low-key fashion). The building it was shot in was definitely one of the stars. A little extra feature about the building reveals a few interesting facts. For example, the shooting in the first floor restaurant was handled in a way that did not interfere with the normal business opeations (or customers) of the real world restaurant there (which made the building's owner quite grateful). Also, way back in the past Hong's film production office was located on the third floor of this same building.