Twelve films into his career as a director of feature films, which began in 1996 with The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, Hong Sang-soo has already created a body of work that is cleverly permutational.
Born in 1960, Hong studied filmmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts, his graduation project focusing on a young woman – filmed naked – discussing her vegetarianism. Further study at the Chicago Art Institute, the discovery of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest and the paintings of Cezanne fuelled Hong’s interest. Living for a spell in Paris, before returning to Korea in 1994 to work for a production company, Dong A Export, Hong eventually planned his first feature.
Watching any one of Hong’s relationship dramas – all but one of which, Night and Day, have been released on DVD with English subtitles at some point – would immediately signal to newcomers the simultaneously inventive and seemingly quotidian events in the lives of his protagonists, which stray far from the typical fare churned out in Hollywood.
The openness with which feelings are articulated – put on the table somewhere among the empty bottles of soju, the dried squid and beef dishes – and met with attempted understanding or sudden hostility is both embarrassing and moving.
It is more rewarding, however, to watch several of Hong’s films in succession – to get beyond any misgivings one might have about Hong’s return to the same subject matter and format and then to relish the playful reconfigurations that each film applies to those that have preceded it. Hong does not seem to be intent on consciously loading his films with in-jokes, but simply returning to consider themes and situations again and again at different stages of his life.
A typical structuring principle underlying Hong’s early works is the severing of the story at the midpoint, leading to one of many cunning tactics, to retread the material in a different way: mirroring the action of the first half, with a different central character; revising the details of the preliminary events by showing it from the perspective of another character (although even these varying points of view take third person liberties); arriving at familiar signposts from a different route; or to create a temporal/meta-filmic discord, as in Tale of Cinema, where we realise that the first half has been a film within the film.
The foregrounding of these, often abrupt, narrative manoeuvres is counterpointed by the unadorned shooting and composition of Hong’s scenes. When a curious habit of making zooms into simple, fixed-camera conversation scenes begins in Tale of Cinema, it is startling and points up the elegant, unshowy direction governing Hong’s films. No doubt numerous essays on the significance of ‘Hong’s zoom’ will accumulate over time, but for the director the reasons are quite straightforward: “Emphasis, intimacy, making of a rhythm within a shot, a sense of alienation, compression, economical way to handle a scene, etc”.
Eschewing cinematic flare, it is the nitty-gritty of the love entanglements, the trials of friendship and pathetic insularity – often tested by sudden bursts of aggression from bit players – that provide the real meat in the films. Hong already has a number of signature moves, some of which are changing over time: inebriated tête-à-têtesbetween old friends or new acquaintances (though it is important to note how open the characters are with one another even when sober).
For these embarrassing and heartfelt, alcohol-fuelled collisions of ideals and emotions Hong admits that he lets the actors get drunk in order to play the scenes; the uneasy, unsatisfactory sex, or the pleasurable screw, often discussed in the midst of the act – not to mention the graphic treatment of the loss of virginity in The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors; and the brief, enigmatic scenes that augment the emotional resonance of the film, even if they serve no ‘dramatic’ purpose – in The Power of Kangwon Province, the male lead nervously tries to navigate his way around a stray dog.
There are multiple sides to each character, which gives Hong’s character behaviour and dialogue a complexity – some might say downright childishness in some instances. Hong is comfortable letting fuck ups (usually male) populate his dramas and it is the continual push and pull between everyone’s ideals and the disappointing reality that surrounds them that makes the films riveting.
The old adage ‘write about what you know’ seems to hold true for Hong: most of his films include protagonists who are involved in the film business, whether as directors, actors, or writers – even film teachers and students appear (Oki’s Movie). No other director has made so many films about the loves and lives of those in the independent film scene, with the action set during the writing stage (Woman on the Beach), on location (The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), during a film festival (Like You Know It All) and following the day-to-day lives of actors (Turning Gate and Tale of Cinema). You begin to realise how little this is dealt with on film – unless in some parodic style, with well-known stars sending themselves up.
The narrative folds, rhymes, repetitions, revisions and transfigurations are artfully constructed but the action maintains a surface simplicity; the blunt and humorous conflicts between the characters are rich, unpredictable and full of emotional gravity. These films may look like ordinary people talking about ordinary life, but this belies the unlikely chance occurrences that underscore Hong’s films, often evoking a fairytale quality.
This is neatly illustrated by the appearance of a fish in the woods that is buried in the dirt by the female protagonist in The Power of Kangwon Province and the disappearance of a fish from a bowl in her ex-lover’s office, noticed at the very end of the film.
Hong Sang-soo – Wide Angle (text) by Yusef Sayed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
