Complete first draft written for Reverse Shot.
Any director as relentlessly prolific, as consciously playful and rooted in self-made conventions as Hong Sang-soo practically demands the viewer to see his newest films in light of their predecessors, older and more immediate alike. Now 26 films into a 25-year career, Hong has only grown more prolific: 2019 was the first year since 2007 in which he didn’t premiere a film, and he has rebounded with three films in the past two years. In this span, he has regularly made multiple films in a single year — beginning in 2010 with Oki’s Movie and Hahaha — and three of these five instances have resulted in multiple New York Film Festival Main Slate appearances in the same year, something almost unheard of this century. As such, the impulse to compare Hong’s films to one another is only heightened when it comes to discussing two — or three, as in the case of 2017, in which Hong premiered On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After — works created in such close proximity to each other. Sometimes, these connections result in marked moments of similarity: the projection of mental images by men onto a central woman in 2013’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and Our Sunhi, or the previously unprecedented (for Hong) focus on death in luminous black-and-white in 2018’s Grass and Hotel by the River. But for such a filmmaker as Hong, whose ability to spin endless, often radically different variations on similar themes — in his own words, “infinite worlds possible” — has been commonly misinterpreted as base repetition, the films more often than not evince considerable differences. 2010 and 2013 both featured extensions of Hong’s then ongoing cycle of Jung Yu-mi films with Oki and Sunhi, while their companion films were, respectively, a unique, hilarious, and interweaved set of vacation coincidences — revealed only to the viewer — with Hahaha, and a more mysterious consideration of family and inner desire in Haewon. The 2017 trifecta found Hong pushing his tonal variety to the limit with the overtly personal On the Beach, the elliptical and cutting black-and-white drama of The Day After (both were selected for NYFF), and the delightful, temporally off-kilter Cannes vacation in Claire’s Camera. While the aesthetic style of his 2018 output (both selected for NYFF) appeared to be unified, Grass imagines a series of conversations between different people as the possible creation of a solitary writer who joins her characters at the close, while Hotel by the River stands among his most emotionally direct and contemplative works, taking concerns about aging and family to a terminal point. Hong continues this trend with his 2021 films: Introduction, which premiered in competition at Berlin, and In Front of Your Face, which showed in the new Cannes Premiere section at Cannes; both are showing in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival. On their surfaces, the films appear to be more dissimilar than any of Hong’s same-year films to date — save perhaps the dual Cannes premieres of Claire’s Camera and The Day After. The former is in black-and-white and covers a nebulously long time period in just 66 minutes, while the latter uses 85 minutes to cover the events of 24 hours in bright colors. But in a break with last year’s The Woman Who Ran, which considered encroaching middle age and a certain ambivalence about domesticity through elliptical means, these two films opt for a much more direct approach — in emotional, if not in narrative terms — to morality, mortality, and the relationship between generations. Introduction takes this last theme as its central conflict, featuring Hong’s first true young adult protagonists for the first time in many years; while Haewon and Hotel also circled this question, their children were already full-fledged adults and much more rooted than the groundless, drifting twentysomethings here. Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho, a cheery face in the midst of Hong’s typical male leads) serves as the primary guide, along with his girlfriend Ju-won (Park Mi-so, the only main actor here who hasn’t been in any Hong film before) as they navigate what, in other hands, could be a conventional premise: two young people trying to find their places in the world while dealing with relationship issues, all the while being prompted and challenged by their parents, inspirations, and other elders. But the progression is considerably complicated here: unfolding in three parts, the last of which takes up half the film, Introduction centers on interactions that lack overt narrative meaning, but which hold significant force in establishing a certain tone of malaise and uncertainty. Much of this has to do with the downplayed nature of the introductions or conversations that initially seemed so important to the characters. In the first part, Young-ho is left waiting to meet his father (Kim Young-ho) because he is occupied with an old friend, a respected actor (Ki Joo-bong) who dropped in unexpectedly. Some months later, Ju-won, who is moving to Hamburg for fashion school in the second part, cuts off her initial meeting with her mother’s (Hong regular Seo Young-hwa) past acquaintance (Kim Min-hee) to reunite with Young-ho, who has impulsively made a quick trip and issues a promise to try to move to be with his love. The third part takes place months, possibly years later, as in that timespan Young-ho has tried and failed to become an actor — inspired by an unseen encounter with the actor in the first part — and broken up with his girlfriend. Meeting for lunch with his mother (Cho Yun-hee) and the actor while bringing his friend (Ha Seong-guk) in tow, he is drunkenly berated by the actor for his unwillingness to hug a woman who wasn’t his girlfriend, before dreaming of a reunion with Ju-won and taking an irrational but enlivening swim on the cold beach. In Front of Your Face takes place on the relative opposite end of the age spectrum, as it follows Sang-ok (Lee Hye-young, in her first Hong performance), a former actor and a Korean expatriate living in the United States, on her first visit back to Seoul in many years. For the first half of the film, she interacts with her sister Jeong-ok (Cho), with whom she is staying temporarily, and various other people as she waits for a late lunch appointment, including her nephew (Shin) and a family living at the home that she lived in when she was a child. Her meeting with Jae-won (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), a slightly younger director who is attempting to encourage her to act in a film he is writing for her, occupies almost the entire second half of the film, a lunch which turns into a Chinese baijiu-induced unfurling of personal secrets and frustrations; Hong, in typical fashion, first offers a practically idyllic ending to this sequence and then undercuts it with the realities that each character faces. Both films are notable in how widely they diverge from Hong’s typical wheelhouse, while still hewing close to his traditional standard of excellence and insight. For one, this is his least focused upon his repertory actors in some time, especially his muse and partner Kim Min-hee, who has appeared as the lead in his past six films. Here, she appears in Introduction in only the second section, and has no onscreen role at all in In Front of Your Face, though she is credited as the production manager. Similarly, the most familiar Hong faces, like Kwon and Ki, only appear in sections, leaving the fresh leads to navigate a world that the veterans have already taken part in. Seo’s roles in the two films are especially notable: as Ju-won’s mother, she shares some scenes with Kim, her frequent scene partner in Hong’s recent films; when they are alone together, the scene almost takes on an entirely different tone that feels purposefully removed from the more bitter and elusive mood of the rest of the film. In the second, she appears briefly as a passerby who takes a photo of the sisters and recognizes Sang-ok as a former actress; her walking companion in the scene is Lee Eun-mi, who played her romantic partner in The Woman Who Ran, one of the most overt examples of a Hong character appearing to play the same role in multiple films and a startlingly familiar element in a set of films that otherwise move in new directions for Hong. In addition, perhaps because of pandemic-related necessity, Hong is taking on many more hats here: in addition to his usual writing and directing roles, he is credited as cinematographer, music composer, and editor of these two films, the first time he has officially fulfilled the prior two roles. Correspondingly, the music, always an unconventionally used but important mood-setter for Hong’s films, is even more stripped down than before, almost wholly reduced to a few guitar strums. Despite the greater amount of incident in Introduction and In Front of Your Face than in, say, the nearly context-free interactions of Grass and The Woman Who Ran, the sense of characterization emerges equally out of the supposed downtime, the moments between the conversations. This is more evident than ever in In Front of Your Face, which has more time to explore than the purposefully curtailed, almost lacunary Introduction. In particular, Hong brings back a technique that he hasn’t used since the first half of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015): voiceover to illustrate a character’s thoughts. Here, they are deployed as a form of prayer, and this links the two films as tightly as any element: Introduction opens with the father’s desperate prayer for a second chance, though his reasons aren’t made explicit. Sang-ok’s own requests are much more sanguine and contemplative, asking for little things like being able to remain vigilant at the meeting and in general to maintain a certain measure of paradise. The reason for this state of grace on the part of this aging woman is eventually explained, along with the meaning behind the title of In Front of Your Face — itself an unusually direct move for Hong, whose titles usually occupy a more poetic and ambiguous dimension — but no such reprieve exists for the young people in Introduction, at least not in explicit narrative terms, as they remain as unmoored and uncertain as ever in the ending. Instead, it is suggested by a gradual move away from the viewpoints of Hong’s regulars, however right they may be, and towards the unknown. After Young-ho takes his uncomfortable but refreshing swim, Hong pans from his still figure to the shifting waves of the beach — effectively mirroring the site of many Hong endings, including The Woman Who Ran — and then, after holding a few moments, panning back to the two friends taking care of each other, a gesture of unity that, after the previous scenes’ rancor, acts as its own measure of tranquility. Such a union ultimately collapses between Sang-ok and Jae-won, but in the last scene Hong circles back to the preexisting relationship between the sisters, conveying with a line and a few gestures a connection that has come out of a difficult situation stronger than ever. If these two Hong films ultimately come out more forthrightly optimistic and clear than his films have in a while, it is a testament to his continued inspiration that they take such diverging, differently compelling pathways to do so.
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