Complete first draft for In Review Online's best of 2023 feature.
I've written before for Reverse Shot about the peculiar phenomenon of comparing and contrasting films written and directed by Hong Sang-soo that comes as a result of them being released in the same year. This is rendered even stranger when two films from adjoining premiere years come out during the same release year, which has happened three times thus far: the annus mirabilis of 2012 with Oki's Movie (2010), The Day He Arrives (2011), and In Another Country (2012); last year with 2022's The Novelist's Film joining 2021 premieres Introduction and In Front of Your Face; and now this year with the two films in present conversation. So, while it may be purely due to the vagaries of distribution (courtesy of the heroes at Cinema Guild) that we have an outlet to consider Walk Up (2022) and in water (2023) in the same year-end breath, it provides a useful excuse to look at these two very different grand achievements, Hong's 28th and 29th films respectively. Upon casting a very preliminary glance, and stripping these already spare works purely down to their essence, they belong to separate modes of Hong: Walk Up the sober black-and-white rumination on middle-age a la The Day After or Hotel by the River; in water the young filmmaker-centric metafiction about the artistic process of Oki's Movie or Our Sunhi. But on further examination neither align strictly with either paradigm, and in fact each attach a new means of expression to Hong's arsenal as vivid as Hill of Freedom's jumbled chronology or The Day He Arrives's perpetual chronological quasi-resets. In Walk Up's case, it is a literalization of Hong's penchant for narrative structure, with said four-part construction corresponding to the four floors of the eponymous apartment building. Kwon Hae-hyo, in perhaps his finest role of his ongoing collaboration with Hong, gradually drifts skyward as what may be months, years, or no time at all pass him by, and the cozy spaces gradually absorb and exude the anxieties over a wasted life that implicitly hang over so many past Hong protagonists. But the constriction in location here magnifies the feeling of each space being haunted with its unique ghosts/alternate realities, and the sense that your past or future life (for better or worse) may be right in front of your face. in water's gambit is both just as simple and visually entrancing as it sounds and more considered than meets than the eye. For one, the out-of-focus shots are not uniform in their look (two interior shots near the start are even in-focus); for another, the perspective they suggest—that of Hong himself, with his well-known failing eyesight—is layered onto that of a young filmmaker just starting out yet possessed with the same ruminations on mortality as Kwon in the past film. Hong certainly isn't lacking for great endings, but what may bind these two films as closely as any commonality is the finesse with which their final shots suddenly snap each of their associated works into startling, devastating focus.
