Most filmmakers start small and aspire to more elaborate productions and thematically richer narratives. On the contrary, South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo has been working backwards from that notion; his films seem to get increasingly shorter, with his first feature from 2021 (In Front of Your Face is the second) and 25th overall having a run time of just over an hour. Hong, however, has indulged in a sort of filmic maximalism, releasing between one and three films a year for the past several years. But they’re beginning to feel as spare narratively as they are in length; one wonders whether there just isn’t much there—if what you see is what you get, albeit in a highly satisfying way that only a master like Hong can achieve—or whether it’s just the filmmaker himself who knows the significance of what’s occurring onscreen. This centers on a young man who’s present in all three of the narrative sections, which take place across an unspecified amount of time: in the first he goes to visit his doctor father and flirts with his father’s receptionist; in the second he follows his girlfriend to Berlin, where she’s gone to live with her mother’s friend while she attends school; and, finally, he shares a meal with his mother and the actor who’d been visiting his father in the first sequence. There’s very little substance, with only a meager bit of exposition providing any kind of throughline, yet the film confounds in its modest ambitions. It was shot in black and white; though not unusual for Hong’s films, this is the first on which he’s also served as cinematographer. In Korean with subtitles. 66 min.
The post Introduction appeared first on Chicago Reader.