The startlingly prolific Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has, apparently with the ease of simply taking another breath, produced another of his lo-fi urban-pastoral comedies; these are small-scale films of Rohmeresque lightness whose regularity and resemblance to each other is such they could almost be regarded as the constituent episodes of a giant, ongoing conceptual saga about city life for Korea’s educated middle classes.
As ever, there are extended, real-time dialogue scenes, mostly shot from a single camera position – occasionally enlivened with a slight zoom or pan – which often take place in cafes or restaurants in which the characters are drinking heavily; sometimes they have outbursts, although their emotional equilibrium is restored by the end of the scene. Hong’s partner Kim Min-hee plays Jeonim, a junior professor at a women’s liberal arts college, sometimes to be seen reading or sketching by the River Han. Although she works in textiles (there is a brief, and borderline-preposterous scene in which she is seated at her loom), Jeonim has to supervise a kind of extra-curricular theatre project in which seven young women students are supposed to be performing a five-minute microdrama or sketch. (The whole movie is like a semi-improv sketch, in its way.)
But the director hired for this has been fired for having affairs with no fewer than three of these students, and so instead Jeonim approaches her glamorous actor uncle Sieon (played by Hong’s repertory regular Kwon Hae-hyo) to take over. He has the leisure to do so, because he has apparently been forced out of his own acting career, perhaps for some wrongdoing similar to the sacked director’s misdeeds, although Hong’s script never openly refers to this obvious irony. But Jeonim is confused and upset when the roguishly attractive Sieon begins a relationship with Jeonim’s senior professor Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), who is simperingly infatuated with this handsome celebrity.
The action of the film unrolls easily and simply, driven by the undemonstrative dialogue; there is one very strange moment in which Jeonim, perhaps disinhibited by the alcohol, recounts an episode of her youth when she was convinced she was bleeding from the eyes and had a vision of blue skies through her bandages. Does the Lynchian strangeness relate in any legible way to everything or anything else in the film? Not obviously, no. (Jeonim also seems to have a weird habit of sleeping outdoors.)
In its engaging and eccentric way, Hong’s film-making is diverting and intriguing and then it capriciously concludes, leaving things up in the air, yet without making you feel shortchanged. Perhaps this one is slighter than his recent work, but it has a comic charm.
