Hong Sang-soo

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares149 Views

    ‘Walk Up’ Review: Good Friends Make Bad Neighbors

    by

    Hong Sang-soo’s latest film traces the relationships in a small Seoul apartment building as they evolve and grow heavier with complications.Just five months after the theatrical release of “The Novelist’s Film,” the fantastically prolific filmmaker Hong Sang-soo offers “Walk Up,” an equally spare and melancholy study of the small moments that define a life. A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.More than most filmmakers, Hong makes movies that benefit from being considered as pieces of a much greater whole. Since the mid-90s, he has directed more than 30, and each I’ve seen tells a talky, minor-key tale of life at the borders of art and self, of relationships and time, set among a sophisticated subset of Seoul’s contemplative class. Think Eric Rohmer but with a lot more Soju.“Walk Up” follows suit, a simple but not simplistic portrait in black-and-white, tracing the relationships in a small Seoul apartment building as they evolve and grow heavier with complications. At the center is a successful filmmaker, Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo), who brings his semi-estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Miso), to a boozy meeting with an old friend (Lee Hyeyoung) who owns the building. With hindsight, the meeting seems to alter the course of Byungsoo’s life, from triumph toward tragedy. But as Hong shows, the seeds of Byungsoo’s undoing were there all along. Tragedy arrives often by drips, failures by slow accretion.Like many great artists, Hong appears in some ways to be trying to tell the same story over and over, each new film an attempt to solve the same essential riddle about what makes us tick. Just as well. For decades, Giorgio Morandi painted almost nothing but bottles and vases. What sublime and subtle insights arise from the variations!Walk UpNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

    More stories

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Novelist’s Film’ Review: Real Talk

      by

      In Hong Sang-soo’s latest study in small moments and chance encounters, a visit to an old friend prompts a writer in crisis to try something new.Amid the wonderfully diverse and daring output of the South Korean film industry in recent decades, the director Hong Sang-soo has been quietly, prolifically making features of the utmost insight and sensitivity — nearly 30 since 1996 — that have nothing to do with the genre-play, melodrama or over-the-top violence associated with some of his better known compatriots.His most recent picture, “The Novelist’s Film,” is no exception, a Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.Much of what typifies Hong’s work will feel familiar in “The Novelist’s Film”: the budget (low); the dialogue (natural); the characters (creative types in crisis); the camera (mostly a fixed, single shot per scene). The story is likewise reliably spare: On a visit to an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) outside Seoul, the novelist Junhee (Lee Hye-young) has a run-in with a movie director who once jilted her professionally (Kwon Hae-hyo) and a famous actress, Kilsoo (Hong’s longtime collaborator Kim Min-hee), who has stepped away from acting indefinitely.Junhee has been struggling creatively herself, and she is prompted to pursue her own experimental short film, in which she urges Kilsoo to participate. Her request, like many of her conversations, is awkwardly frank. Meaning teems in the uncomfortable silences and deflections; each platitude contains multitudes. Is Kilsoo interested or playing nice?Hong works fast, rarely preparing scripts more than a day in advance, which may help explain how his films can be so talky without feeling scripted — a minor miracle each time he does it, which is about once a year. Long may he run-and-gun.The Novelist’s FilmNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘In Front of Your Face’ Review: Clumsy Interactions, Pensive Revelations

      by

      This film is a minor addition to the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s continuing investigation of human embarrassment.It often seems as though the most devoted fans of the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo regard him as incapable of making an inessential work. Because his films play with theme and variation, the logic goes, they are best viewed in tandem, as installments in a continually refined investigation of the clumsy, painful, droll ways that people, often booze-slicked, interact. A current series of Hong’s features at Film at Lincoln Center presents most of the titles on double bills.But if Hong is consistent in his material and his style, down to his signature zooms, his features are uneven in quality. For every “Hotel by the River” (2019), he makes a quickie that seems to have leaped straight from inspiration to screen. With its limited settings and characters, noodled synthesizer score (composed by Hong himself) and long takes that court cringe comedy but also look like they were simply practical, “In Front of Your Face,” one of two Hong movies from last year’s New York Film Festival, falls into the minor camp.Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung) is a former actress visiting South Korea from her home in the United States. Her sister, Jeongok (Cho Yunhee), remarks that there’s a lot they don’t know about each other anymore. Sangok has a meeting with Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo), a Hong-like filmmaker — she compares his movies to short stories — who wants to cast her.A stain on an outfit from an impulsive meal, a changed meeting spot and the absence of food at the new location pose obstacles before Sangok confides in Jaewon, in a revelation that contains the film’s point. The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.In Front of Your FaceNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

      by

      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

      by

      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Woman Who Ran’ Review: Conversations With Friends

      by

      Hong Sangsoo’s latest film is a concise trilogy of awkward visits.“The Woman Who Ran,” Hong Sangsoo’s compact 24th feature — about an hour and a quarter from start to finish — consists of three visits. Gamhee (Kim Minhee, a fixture of the Hong cinematic universe) drops in on an old friend who is divorced, another who is single and a third whose marriage is a source of some awkwardness between them. Gamhee, who has been married for five years, tells each of her hosts that this is the first time she and her husband, who is away on a business trip, have been apart.The fact that she repeats this assertion introduces a sliver of uncertainty into what appears to be a tidy, quiet, symmetrical film. That uneasiness — the sense that everything is perfectly clear and utterly mysterious — is as much a directorial signature of Hong’s as smoking, drinking and sudden zooms in.You might wonder if the vignettes represent chronologically adjacent episodes on a single trip, or if each is an entirely different adventure. The title suggests flight, and it seems possible that Gamhee is running away from home, seeking refuge among women who might understand what she is going through without having to talk about it.The characters speak plainly and obliquely, chatting about food, weather, architecture and other safely banal topics, as well as about love and work. Gamhee eats a delicious home-cooked meal with Youngsoon (Seo Younghwa) and a not-so-good one with Suyoung (Song Seonmi), which she compliments anyway. With Woojin (Kim Saebyuk), who Gamhee meets in a cafe next to a movie theater, she drinks coffee and shares an apple.The apple is one of several motifs — another hallmark of Hong’s style — that loop through the movie, producing a sense of structure in the relative absence of a plot. More than once, an apple is peeled and sliced. More than once, Gamhee watches the interactions of other characters through an entranceway security video.Youngsoon, who lives with a roommate in a rural area, tells Gamhee about a neighbor’s rooster, who harasses the hens, jumping on their backs and pecking at their necks. He’s not trying to mate with them, she explains, “he’s just mean.” The men in “The Woman Who Ran” are like human avatars of that nasty bird, intruding on the leisure and intimacy of women to crow and scratch and ruffle feathers.One guy shows up to complain about the feral cats that Youngsoon and her roommate are in the habit of feeding. Another rings Suyoung’s doorbell to whine about how she humiliated and insulted him after they slept together. To say much about the third gentleman might count as something of a spoiler, though maybe that’s giving him — a former love of Gamhee’s and a writer besotted by his own celebrity — too much credit.Hong, a prolific miniaturist with an unmatched eye and ear for heterosexual romantic disappointment, is often compared to Eric Rohmer, the French writer-director who specialized in fables of wayward desire among the bourgeois-bohemian class. To me, he more closely resembles a short-story writer like Ann Beattie or Alice Munro, assembling an anthology of recognizably similar but always distinct approaches to a carefully selected set of characters and themes.Some of the individual tales may hit the emotions harder or stay in the mind longer, and some viewers may never acquire a taste for his talky, elliptical, melancholy style. For those of us who delight in his elegant explorations of drunkenness, regret, lust and ennui, he isan indispensable comedian of modern manners, good and bad, and his steady (or perhaps compulsive) productivity is a gift. “The Woman Who Ran” is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.The Woman Who RanNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More