3 hours ago
5
It will not surprise fans of the prolific lo-fi Korean master Hong Sang-soo that his new film in black-and-white – which might be described as “experimental” by those who don’t quite realise that they all look like this – features long scenes, shot from a single, static camera position, featuring a conversation in a restaurant. Nor will they be surprised that one of these scenes contains a sudden, unobtrusive zoom-in to a closer position, for no obvious reason.
It will not be startling for them that the film features someone playing a female screen star of a certain age philosophically pondering her career and life-choices (a key Hong trope). And it certainly won’t be a shock that the film has a character ordering a beer or two before the sun is technically over the yardarm. There is no one in the movies, or in any of the arts, or any aspect of public life, anywhere in the world, who is more utterly dedicated to day-drinking than Hong Sang-soo.
The mannerisms are all there, but for me, they come together more satisfyingly here than in some of his other recent work; it is possessed of infinitely subtle poignancy and mystery, beginning with the riddle of the title.
Song Seon-mi plays Jeong-su, a famous actor in her 40s who has evidently taken a career break connected with motherhood and then divorce, and has, as a single mum, returned in a low-key indie film for which she is now giving interviews. There are three of them, back-to-back, and the interviewers are almost interchangeable, one of the film’s almost indetectable structural jokes. They are well-spoken, demurely respectful women around 15 years younger than Jeong-su; and they evidently have a brief from their editors to concentrate on the human interest side, asking not so much about the film – of which we really learn nothing, another tacit joke – but how Jeong-su is feeling.
She asks the interviewers if they would like a beer. Most say no. She is uncomfortable answering questions about the divorce at first, but then opens up and becomes tearful, advising the young woman not to live without love. When one interviewer tells her about a fight she herself just had with her boyfriend, Jeong-su appears to relax, despite this interviewer congratulating her on the “cold childlike aura you exude … like a small child”. There are two “break” scenes between the three setpiece interviews, in which Jeong-su is vaping or smoking outside, worrying that she has said too much. Afterwards, she shows us that for all her gentle demeanour, she is as tough as any Hollywood diva, calling one interviewer on her mobile, requesting certain answers to be deleted and even asking for copy approval.
So far, the movie feels like a gentle satire, not so far from Hugh Grant’s Horse and Hound interview scenes in Richard Curtis’s comedy Notting Hill. And many real stars have commented on the punishingly surreal experience of doing a string of interviews and feeling them blur into one. But afterwards Jeong-su goes to the acting class that she had told one interviewer about; it was not just part of some studied pantomime of humility, she really does have this class. And her first assignment is autofictional: to recreate the interviews she has just done, with a classmate playing the journalist. Intriguingly, Jeong-su conflates the three conversations as best she can, but starts including things she hasn’t said – Buddhist observations about what is real and what isn’t and about when and whether one is experiencing life fully.
This fourth conversation, so far from being an overtly or dramatically fictional version of the first three, is just equal with it. It is no more contrived than these first three encounters and just as likely to yield real self-knowledge. There are no closeups or musical stabs to let you know that something important is happening in Jeong-su’s head, the way there might in another type of film, and the fact of her having had a few beers is not represented as wrong or reckless or even necessarily all that significant. The conversation just unrolls at a consistent volume, tempo and pace. The film withholds overt meaning like a short story … and is quietly engrossing.
English (US) ·