What Time Is It There? First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Calling Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work interconnected doesn’t begin to cover the throughlines that have developed over the span of more than three decades. One of the most teleological of oeuvres, it isn’t just a matter of recapitulating his recurring interests — a decaying Taipei, cruising, water, infrequent but definite touches of the surreal, and above all the form of Lee Kang-sheng — but also of examining how each building block develops upon these motifs, whether in the creeping stasis commonly associated with his work or in giant leaps. By dint of Lee’s presence — along with numerous, less recognized repertory players like Yang Kuei-mei, Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Lu Yi-ching — as first Hsiao-kang, then just Kang, and the recurring anchors in lower-class Taipei living and family, Tsai’s films already carry the unmistakable suggestion of a narrative and temporal continuity that rises above the particulars of any one film. But What Time Is It There? (2001), which more-or-less constituted his international breakthrough, is an especially concentrated example, coming as it does at the fulcrum of Tsai’s narrative feature career before his brief retirement after Stray Dogs (2013). Marking the halfway point, along with the entirely dissimilar Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), it also, at least retroactively, literalizes this heretofore latent connection: it is the first in a loose trilogy, along with the short “The Skywalk Is Gone” (2002) and The Wayward Cloud (2005), following the interactions of Lee and Chen’s characters as their interactions become ever more desperate and unnerving. This triptych, incidentally, is broken up by Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the one feature that does not center Lee and which may very well not have him playing Hsiao-kang — though the Fuhe Grand Theater does actually appear in this film briefly in a much less dilapidated form. While this explicit connection might lead one to expect an accompanying compatibility of tones, this isn’t the case: “The Skywalk Is Gone” — referring to the bridge over Taipei roads where Lee and Chen first meet — occupies something close to his usual durational cinema style, while The Wayward Cloud collides its seedy porn filmmaking milieu with gonzo bathroom-themed musical numbers. And What Time Is It There? finds itself, fascinatingly, in a realm that Tsai has only rarely dived into. Typically, his films (aside from the aforementioned Goodbye, Dragon Inn) center upon Lee and one other person, whether it be Yang in The Hole (1998), Anong Houngheuangsy in Days (2021), or Lu in Stray Dogs (2013). But here, Tsai fragments his approach further, effectively creating a triangular focus between Lee, Chen, and Lu (who, as in most of her Tsai appearances, plays Lee’s mother and Miao’s wife). The reasons for this arrive with an atypical, piercing clarity: after an opening scene with Miao alone in the family apartment so familiar from past Tsai films, the next shot finds Lee riding in a car with his father’s urn. From there, What Time Is It There? both does and doesn’t adhere to the cycles of grief that Lee and Lu go through. Even without factoring in the substantial factor of Chen’s storyline — wherein she leaves for a lonely, meandering trip in Paris after she buys Lee’s watch, which he says will bring her bad luck — there are few of the tears and mourning expected of bereavement. Instead, in keeping with the inexplicable, all-consuming longings so central to Tsai’s oeuvre, Lee and Lu become obsessed, with Chen’s rootlessness as a significant, often mysterious counterweight. Lu feverishly works to ensure that Miao’s reincarnation and/or spirit will remain in the apartment, constantly cooking food at odd hours and putting up sheets to block the sunlight with a singular determination not often found in Tsai’s films. In between hawking watches, Lee becomes entranced with setting the time on practically every clock he sees to Parisian time, seven hours behind, whether it be the digital readout in his car or the clock face on a tall city building, along with a fixation on Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows. Both manias come implicitly from not only grief, but from an overfamiliarity with their environments, manifesting itself in a desire to control or reshape these Taipei surroundings. While Lu’s efforts register as tragic and pathetic — epitomized in a startingly confrontational scene where Lee attempts to stop her from sealing the walls with duct tape — and Lee’s are surreal and comedic, Chen’s scenes come to embody both, in the manner that tourists in a strange land can often be. There is something charged about how Chen stands still on a moving walkway as Parisians rush past her, or the exchange of glances that she has with a Chinese man on a separate subway platform from her. These gestures remain unfulfilled, as do most of her moments, most of all the glorious appearance of Léaud himself in a cemetery, as he slyly gives her his phone number. All these desires culminate in a trinity of erotic encounters that Tsai crosscuts between, and it is here that questions of time — so inherent to slow cinema — come to the fore. All of these moments take place at night, but this would rule out the possibility of Chen’s encounter with a Hong Kong woman in bed — the sole instance of overt female queerness in a filmography intrinsically linked to male homosexuality — taking place at the same time as Lee’s tryst with a prostitute and Lu’s solo — or possibly spiritually assisted — sensual release. What Time Is It There?’s power is such that the connection between the three scenes resonates on both a narrative level (all three being emotional, if not all sexual climaxes) and on something more mystical. The ending, where Miao makes his first of several ghostly appearances in Tsai’s films, implies that the already freighted watch carried much more than an omen to Paris. But Tsai’s cinema is so tactile, so immediately present that whether the superstitions of one religion or another scarcely seems to matter. Instead, power is found in conviction, in steadfast belief, and the focus of each moment yields endless amounts of care and desire, where grief is transformed into an entire way of viewing the quotidian and the unsteadiness of travel reverberates across the world.

In Review Online Drive My Car First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Of all the innumerable gambits and devices that Hamaguchi Ryūsuke deploys in his immense Drive My Car, his particular use of language may be the most beautiful and fundamental. On some level this has almost been taken for granted: the film is an expanded adaptation of a Murakami Haruki short story, Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi) is a theater director and actor, and the staging of Uncle Vanya at the Hiroshima festival draws all the characters introduced after the first forty minutes into the same orbit, so it is natural that so much time would be dedicated to the analysis of speech, to paying particular attention to dialogue and its structure in a manner that some might not associate as stringently with a typical arthouse film, even one as relatively accessible as this one. But Hamaguchi’s fascination goes even deeper than that. Kafuku presents a concise yet mystic summation of Chekhov that might be taken as something of a mission statement for the film, saying that he has refused to play Vanya because “when you say his lines, it drags out the real you,” something that cannot be borne by a man so wracked with doubt and grief in such an exposed setting. But the question of where the lines end and something more indefinite, yet just as full of truth, begins is left hanging. It’s very much worth noting that this dialogue comes two-thirds of the way through Drive My Car, and that soon afterwards Chekhov in a stage or even audiotape form will be set aside for a flight into the countryside, where the Vanya/Sonya dynamic will be played out in less obviously locked-down settings. Yet herein lies a paradox: this penultimate stretch of the film, in which Kafuku and Watari (Miura Tōko) lay bare the pasts of themselves and those they lost, is at once the quietest — there is even a moment where the sound completely drops out as the Saab arrives in the snow — and the most obviously narratively-driven part of the film, which fully commits to its transposition of Chekhov’s characters onto Hamaguchi’s central two figures. Indeed, one of the longest takes in the film, a five-minute emotional, approaches theatricality in its locked-down medium shot and simple staging, with Kafuku on the left and Watari on the right talking to each other. So, if Kafuku’s assessment of Chekhov is meant to then emanate both forwards and backwards, it does so in a way that effectively throws each and every scene into relief. The rehearsal scenes assume even greater importance, and various moments of explicit emotional revelation, like Takatsuki’s (Okada Masaki) monologue or the wondrous conversation with Lee Yun-a (Park Yu-rim), are linked in the viewer’s mind to a sense of transference, a feeling that exposure to Uncle Vanya has allowed for a freedom to express one’s true self in a way otherwise limited by reticence or the limitations of societal conventions or customs, even coming down to the language barriers that are frequently invoked. And it is notable that, though Oto’s (Kirishima Reika) taped reading of Chekhov is not heard again after this turning point, her nature, previously construed as potentially duplicitous and unknowable, becomes something much more open and revelatory. Hamaguchi fills his films with these evolutions of understanding, with these transformations of scenes that might be seen as simply quotidian into a realm that represents a staging ground for new perspectives and emotions. In its scope and indelible etchings of its characters, Drive My Car may be the fullest expression yet of one of his greatest strengths.

In Review Online Malmkrog First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Cristi Puiu’s fifth fiction feature Malmkrog represents a further entrenchment in the oeuvre of perhaps the Romanian New Wave’s most dedicated portrayer of claustrophobic incidents and the web of personal interactions that can result in such confined spaces and at such long durations. Malmkrog represents something of an extreme in both regards: his first period film, it is set entirely in a luxurious, secluded manor in fin de siècle Transylvania and runs a full three hours and twenty minutes. These further extended stretches of time also contain little of the life-and-death drama of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the methodical killings of Aurora, or the deft family interplay of Sieranevada. Instead, Malmkrog confines itself almost exclusively to the philosophical, ethical, and ecumenical debates of five aristocrats, which principally cover those two inevitably intertwined constants in any empire: war and religion. But far from an arid exercise — ironic, considering the film’s foundations in Puiu’s prior staging of excerpts from Vladimir Solovyov’s novel War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ at an acting workshop in Toulouse that was later compiled into his Three Interpretation Exercises (2013) — Malmkrog emerges something as uniquely cinematic, as much in Puiu’s sense for blocking and motion as in the words and tone that are adopted over the vast bulk of 200 minutes. Split into six discrete segments, the film is careful to ensure a continuity of rigor and playfulness while varying its approach: the first segment is taken up mostly by a 44-minute long-take, which vacillates between static, stately frames and sudden pivots to catch the change in positions of each participant in the conversation, while two of the other segments are shot in individual close-ups as the speakers sit at a dinner table, cutting constantly with a marked literalism. Yet despite the potential realism of what is being depicted, save for a few spectral images and one tremendously disorienting rupture, the film’s affect lies somewhere in between. The plain absurdity of the situation, which draws dinner guests into meals that they sit down for but barely touch, instead preferring to prattle on for hours, only grows further as the night draws on, and yet it would totally overstate the situation to say that Puiu mostly uses these words as a means to lampoon the self-importance of the rich. The looming world wars are but the most obvious lenses upon which to view the relevance of these extended conversations, and it is apparent from Puiu’s watchful gaze that he finds something inherently fascinating about, say, the way the host reads from the Gospel According to Luke in order to refute one of the guests’ assertions; in many ways, this is one of the great recent films about religion and the particular ways in which believers interact with each other. And there is just as much care paid to certain details, like the interplay between the aristocrats and their servants — the second chapter is dedicated to the lead servant — or the choice of language: despite the Romanian setting, most of the film is conducted in French, the de facto language of the aristocrats at the time. Such signifiers pile up over time, and yet Malmkrog remains an immediate, bracing experience from the get-go, so monomaniacally focused is it upon the pleasures and pain of verbal one-upmanship and discourse. Puiu’s graceful direction remains consistent as an essential ballast, and the purposeful irresolution at the close only feels fitting for the existence of those in perpetual suspension, cloistered and secure in their ideologies.

Frameland 2021 Features First Draft

Complete first drafts for Frameland.

Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream It was perhaps no surprise last year that people turned to films from the past in order to contextualize and, perhaps, find some measure of solace and comfort. People naturally gravitated to works concerning some notion of infection, including the obvious Contagion and, on a much more wonderfully unanticipated notice, Tsai’s The Hole and Kurosawa’s Bright Future. However, perhaps both the most fitting and unusual choice was released this year: Frank Beauvais’s Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, which, in an extra bit of irony, premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2019, was scheduled to have a Film Forum run in April 2020, only to finally, belatedly, receive a January 2021 Film Forum virtual cinema release. An especially dizzying exemplar of the collage film, it is made up solely of brief shots from the 400-some films that Beauvais watched between April and October 2016, a period in his life filled with profound isolation and depression where he did basically nothing but watch films in the little village dwelling where he was abandoned by his partner. The short film clips, carefully chosen to eschew close-ups, and thus identifiability, are paired to a narration which frankly lays out his ongoing state of affairs, and the ambiguity on one side, and the blunt demarcations on the other, pair to form an odd, wondrous bond. By taking out all the expected bits of signposting, Beauvais dives fully into the swirl of images that comes with the madness of cinephilia, with the flickers of strife corresponding to the horrors of last year with depressingly full force for film lovers with a simpatico mindset. Even more than its skillful construction and daring associations, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream emerges as an omnivorous exorcism, a brilliant evocation of a mindset that yearns for, yet is unable to escape, at least for a time.

Impromptu Dinner (Drive My Car) A film as expansive and quietly complex as Drive My Car offers numerous inroads into Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s central concerns. One of the more understated yet fitting ones comes almost exactly halfway through the three-hour runtime, and arises, like many of the encounters that Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi) has throughout the film, almost by sheer happenstance. After a day of theater rehearsals, Kafuku offers to give his dramaturge Yun-su (Jin Dae-yeon) a ride back to his house, for which he is offered dinner in turn. This leads to the utterly charming reveal of one of the cutest couples in film history: Yun-su is married to one of the central production’s actors, Yun-a (Park Yu-rim). This sets the tone for a set of dinner conversations that, as much as any scene in the film, is equally delightful, moving, awkward, and insightful, with Kafuku’s driver Misaki (Miura Tōko) present as a silent but palpable counterpoint. Misaki’s taciturn nature exists almost as the inverse of Yu-su’s own physical muteness: where the former keeps to herself, slowly opening up as the film moves along, Park’s expressivity and passion emerges with forceful poise from her very first scene. While often present, she is given a handful of true showcase scenes, each seeming to tilt the entire film’s sense of equilibrium on its practice. And it is here, the only one where the words are her own and not Chekov’s, that it comes most fully into being — though of course she is still being interpreted by Yun-su; characters are fittingly never free from mediation in Hamaguchi’s films. Talking about her past and her decision to start acting, her clarity of thought and reason shines all the brighter in the face of the conflicting emotions present elsewhere. The ability to move on from past traumas and find a better tomorrow is one that each character is seeking in their own way, and Yun-su’s role in this, and her totally generous description of how she got to it, is as cathartic and beautiful as the many other brilliant scenes of more forthright understanding.

West Side Story First Draft

Complete first draft for The Film Stage.

West Side Story — a curious exception in the modern glut of sequels and remakes, with its powerhouse combination of hallowed subject matter and director — announces itself immediately. Where the original 1961 film helmed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins began with a series of aerial shots over New York City, director Steven Spielberg opts for an elaborate crane shot that etches out an important distinction: this story is set amid the slums in the process of being cleared for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the immaculate Manhattan arts complex where, it must be said, the film premiered a few days ago. While previous incarnations of the Romeo and Juliet-inspired musical — with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by the dearly departed Stephen Sondheim — were identifiably set in a downtrodden New York, an entirely different sense of precarity begins here, woven into the fabric of the film, as the Jets’ struggle with the Sharks seems doomed almost before it begins. West Side Story traffics in such deviations, at the level of both form and content, in a manner that alternately heralds the brilliance of both its source material and its director. In terms of its song and narrative structure, it functions as a hybrid of the musical — “Cool” is moved back to Act 1 — and Wise and Robbins’ film — “America” remains a buoyant series of ripostes between Anita (Ariana DeBose) and Bernardo (David Alvarez). But in others, Spielberg and Tony Kushner have greatly built out the contexts of characters, beginning with Tony (Ansel Elgort) himself, who at the start of the film has just been released after a year’s stint in prison for almost killing another boy in a gang fight. Apart from giving him another reason for wanting to leave the gang lifestyle, it also institutes a theme of transformation that courses through a number of the characters: María’s (Rachel Zegler) prospective fiancé Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) is a bookish accountant who wants to join the Sharks against Bernardo’s wishes, Anybodys’s (nonbinary actor Iris Mena) desire to be in the Jets and assertion of gender identity is further emphasized. While West Side Story, with its two-day timespan and inevitable tragic end, is an inherently linear work, this version registers as even more focused in its progression and development of characters. Across the board, arcs or scenes not present in the original work lend an additional layer of urgency to West Side Story, whether they be as charming as María deciding whether or not to wear lipstick (against Bernardo’s wishes) to the dance, or as charged as Riff — Mike Faist, who practically steals the film with his unique combination of ease, intensity, and vulnerability — purchasing a gun to bring to the rumble; “Cool” is reconfigured as a duel between him and Tony, who attempts to take the gun from him to prevent the rumble from happening. In line with the concerted efforts to cast Latinx actors for the Puerto Rican characters, purposefully unsubtitled Spanish plays a significant role: first in a rousing song that the Sharks sing in defiance of the Jets and the police after the fight in the prologue, then in a set of conversations between María, Anita, and Bernardo, wherein they speak a mix of English and Spanish. In keeping with a general aspirational spirit through this version that collides with the tragedy, Bernardo is a boxer intending to make his living, and so Anita constantly chastises him, telling him and María to practice speaking English, even while all three of them feel more comfortable expressing themselves naturally in Spanish. All of this is consciously configured so that English speakers will understand everything of importance, but there’s a sensitivity to the way that people speak on both sides that is embodied in one of the biggest yet most reverential changes: Doc is replaced with Valentina, the Puerto Rican widow of Doc who runs his store, and is played by Rita Moreno, the original film’s Anita. Very much in the role of a mentor, she represents an alternative path of racial and behavioral harmony, singing “Somewhere” and participating in the final procession that closes the film. While actors like Moreno, Faist, DeBose, and newcomer Zegler get their moments to shine, it’s likely most accurate to say that West Side Story’s star is Spielberg himself, with a great deal of assistance from stalwart cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, production designer Adam Stockhausen, and costumer Paul Tazewell. With his first full-fledged musical, Spielberg has further incorporated the swooping cameras and piercing lighting that have defined his style as of late; even more fascinatingly, his choices in setting bring out fascinating motifs. The Jets and their turf are defined by blue and cooler tones, while the Sharks and the Puerto Rican neighborhoods opt for warmer, typically orange tones, and the interplay alone in Tony and María’s costumes suggests its own clear progression. While the locales in the 1961 film certainly felt authentic, here they are bustling with life, suggesting something of Jacques Demy in the incorporation of whole communities within musical numbers: “America” becomes even more lively when characters are weaving in and out of stores, crowds, and sidewalks, taking over the streets for short bursts before moving back once again. “I Feel Pretty”’s dress store becomes a multi-level emporium where María literally tries on the fashions and lifestyle of the White upper-class, a literalization very much in keeping with Spielberg’s overall vision. When the very ground on which people live becomes uncertain, the necessity of passion — in love, in combat — becomes all the more apparent, and Spielberg’s fidelity to that sentiment and to his own decisions bears the vitality of this alternate take aloft.

Licorice Pizza First Draft

Complete first draft written for The Film Stage.

Throughout his career, Paul Thomas Anderson has always had a fascination with pretenders, with people who use their assumed gigs and personas as a shield for their own deep insecurities. From Tom Cruise’s alpha guru in Magnolia to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s blustering mystic in The Master, Josh Brolin’s cop in Inherent Vice to Paul Dano’s preacher in There Will Be Blood, these characters that circle and attempt to entrap Anderson’s putative protagonists often end up as the most fascinating elements of his films, teasing out a canniness and resourcefulness that resonates with his view of American self-actualization. That recurring use of hucksters has now ascended to the level of text with Licorice Pizza, which returns to the sunny San Fernando Valley setting of the films from the first half of his career. Set in 1973, it follows Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, the son of Anderson’s deceased muse), a 15-year-old child actor and voracious entrepreneur, and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a prospectless 25-year-old who transfixes Gary when he first sees her in the line for high school photos. After immediately proclaiming his affection for her — which she quickly turns down for obvious reasons — Gary nevertheless forges a friendship with Alana, and together they embark on a series of highs and lows in both their personal and professional interactions. Gary, whose acting prospects are drying up, begins selling waterbeds, then opens a pinball palace, ventures both based on fads and rumors; Alana pursues first acting then politics, actions undertaken based on a broader sense of dissatisfaction with the course of her life. As might be expected, Licorice Pizza operates in a much more clearly definable mode than the majority of Anderson’s works: the coming-of-age film, though fascinatingly it is applied to both the teen and the young woman. Alana and Gary are effectively equals through the course of the film, which remains more-or-less wholly tied to their perspectives throughout, shifting fluidly between wide-eyed idealism and something more pragmatic, if not bitter. Bitterness, or at the very least reality, comes in the form of the four adults, each based on real people, who successively take center stage in the last half of the film for their own sequences: actor Jack Holden (Sean Penn channeling William Holden) and director Rex Blau (Tom Waits), hairdresser and famously illiterate producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), and closeted politician Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie). Each man puts on his own airs, whether they be the private and necessary secrecy of Wachs, the coked-up macho energy of Peters, or the carousing and creative fantasies of Holden and Blau — indeed, the first conversation between Penn and Waits, each trying to out-gravel each other in their murmured reminiscences, heralds an entirely different energy that the film occupies until its final moments, which enter an entirely different feeling of rapture. For Licorice Pizza ultimately is a funny and romantic film, if filled with danger and excitement — the Peters section ranks as one of the more harrowing vehicle-based sequences in recent memory — filled to burst with incidents and details. To match this, it feels like Anderson has returned to a more youthful style, filling the film with long Steadicam tracking shots through groups of people in rapid motion. There is also a broader approach to comedy than Anderson has used in some time, which especially focuses on identities: the Haim family plays themselves and emphasizes their Jewishness, John Michael Higgins plays a restaurant owner who speaks to his virtually interchangeable Japanese wives in a horrendous accent and pretends to understand what they are saying. In the midst of this general climate of hustling, Gary and Alana emerge from the tapestry in large part because their pretending goes so hand-in-hand with their zest for life. Hoffman and Haim are quite natural and relaxed in the way they carry themselves, the former filled with an awkward confidence and the latter a forthright radiance, and by the close of the film, it is apparent that their roads are inextricably intertwined, no matter the obstacles life throws in their way. As it is with them, as it is with Anderson and Licorice Pizza: recognition of the failings of others, the compromises that those weighed down by the past must take, can allow the younger people to take flight in their own idiosyncratic directions, at least for a little while.

Introduction/In Front of Your Face First Draft

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.