mul-an-e-seo

A young director and his two collaborators arrive on the touristy island of Jeju to shoot a low budget film seemingly without a script. As they wait for an idea to take shape, they scout banal locations, rehearse simple scenes and share meals together, mostly junk food. Standing on a cold and windy cliff one day, the director notices a woman clearing the beach of the trash tourists have thrown there, leading him to think about the lonely, Sisyphean task of living within a consumerist society in full awareness of the fact. The idea of an underworld, populated by the ghosts repressed by our way of life, discreetly starts to form in our minds.
In this film about the making of a film, everything happens not so differently from how we imagine Hong Sangsoo himself works. But the true novelty of his 29th feature and its obvious distinguishing feature is that it is shot almost entirely out-of-focus, to comic and indeterminate effect. Hong never provides a clear explanation for this choice. But one recalls a line from IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE, where the protagonist, in the final months of her life, expresses the desire to live in absolute clarity: an impossible ideal that is also the false promise of our digital world. (Antoine Thirion)

Hong Sangsoo: VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000), TALE OF CINEMA (2005), WOMAN ON THE BEACH (2006), NIGHT AND DAY (2008), HA HA HA (2010), IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (2012), NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (2013), OUR SUNHI (2013), HILL OF FREEDOM (2014), CLAIRE’S CAMERA (2017), THE DAY AFTER (2017), GRASS (2018), HOTEL BY THE RIVER (2018), THE WOMAN WHO RAN (2020), INTRODUCTION (2021), IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE (2021), THE NOVELIST’S FILM (2022), WALK UP (2022), IN OUR DAY (2023)