In-teu-ro-deok-syeon

A young actor is doubting his profession due to his belief that the interpretation of feelings and embraces in cinema are not believable. This is more than enough to allow Hong to condense his focused clarity and effortlessly express it in one of his recurring studies about the sentimental (lack of) communication between men and women of a certain class, who belong to the arts and are moored somewhere between youth and maturity. The ingenuity of the Korean filmmaker here consists in sustaining the anecdote alluded to as the omnipresent substance of the tale, dividing it into three episodes (two in Korea and one in Germany) and adding the presence of the characters that it needs: the main character’s separated parents, the girlfriend, a friend, a famous actor, and the father’s secretary. These characters and various situations devoid of dramatism are enough to demonstrate, paradoxically, that embraces and feelings in the cinema can indeed be made believable. Hong’s poetics remain the same: the filmmaker’s characteristic zooms, the magnificent introduction of a dream, the perfection decision in terms of how to film snow, trees, and sea without overreacting to their beauty, and the precision of the tale’s temporality place this brief, pleasant incursion within Hong’s customary symbolic and aesthetic realm. (Roger Koza)

Hong Sangsoo: VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000), WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004), 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), RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (2015), YOURSELF AND YOURS (2016), ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (2017), CLAIRE’S CAMERA (2017), THE DAY AFTER (2017), GRASS (2018), HOTEL BY THE RIVER (2018), THE WOMAN WHO RAN (2020), IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE (2021)