Hong Sang-soo: Capturing Everyday Intimacies

Hong Sang-soo is an anomaly in the landscape of contemporary Korean cinema. Far from extravagant spectacles, epics or psychological/horror thrillers, Hong’s cinema grapples 🀅with the language of intimacy. Each of his characters wrestles with seemingly small moments that span a sizeable emotional trajectory. Often, they rely on friends and colleagues for counsel on navigating life. Both men and women in his films, especially men, are lost, fumbling and searching for grace in the mundane. An encounter with a stranger offers new possibilities.

His films are grounded in quotidian rhythms of life. They bubble with improvisational energy. Hong churns out dialogues on the morning of the shoot. He keeps the actors in the dark, preferring spontaneous, momentary reactivity instead of elaborate psychoanalysing. There’s a certain light-🌌footedness to the way his characters navigate the emotional crosshairs of their lives. You won’t stumble across any grand declarations of style or tinkering with cinematic form. Hong rarely departs from signature motifs and tendencies, extracting pleasures from the familiar. Templates remain steady, unchanged. Characters have casual, sprawling, revealing conversations over soju or makgeolli. Zooms abruptly interrupt the largely static, long takes. A sporadic surge of music awkwardly crashes in and quickly retreats. Such choices stimulate a tussle between obtrusive elements and an unaffected air to the scenes. It’s a strange dichotomy, one that cultivates observation with jarring impositions of technique.

Chats among his characters move from exchanging harmless niceties to pained, abrasive confessions or confrontations. Broken families, shattered hearts, unfaithfulness of lovers, absent fathers—conversational convergences across the breadth of his career aren’t tough to miss. In Hotel By the River (2018), a soju session between a father and his kids ဣerupts in a confrontation over parental abandonment. Bitter barbs are traded, there’s long-overdue steam-letting and a shard of reconciliation. But this doesn’t arrive without loss, delivered ever s𓂃o softly.

Along with a thread of families, another thematic twine limns his work—the recurring figure of the artist (invariably male) and his admirer, usually a woman. The artist may at times be a poet or a filmmaker. Inevitably, the question of ego and vanity perforates the dialogue. Hong acknowledges it but also refrains from slicing deeper. His cinema quietly captures the fragility and frailty of human dilemmas. However, there’s little cutting castigation, only an admission of the flaws of men, provoking irritation and exhaustion. Women in his films may initially be taken in by the stature of the male artists but soon they see through the oversized myth. Power games that could have shaped up fade out. Hong’s female characters are extraordinarily intuitive, gradually attuned to the undercurrent of any circumstance. In his latest film, By the Stream (2024), the discovery of a young theatre director’s secret relationships with three of his students elicits the central drama. The girls are naturally hurt but they don’t wallow in grief; they 🅘form their own support system instead of any fallouts among themselves. It’s the male director who insists he’s the one who’s wronged. Hong rarely gives men self-reflection and growth. The women sighingly assert that men are cowards and can barely grasp matters of the heart.

Here is an oeuvre occupying the stark other end of the spectrum. If New Korean Cinema amps up genre thrills, drawing together violence and horror, as embodied in the works of Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook, 🃏Hong takes an unhurried, pared-down approach. The settings don’t stray far from Seoul, largely confined to restaurants, parks and domestic interiors.

In his cinema, you are invited to slow down and bask in the beauty of a morning, partake in the simple joy of fresh blossoms outside your window. It’s his female characters who turn us to everyday scenes of delight, while men are busy carping or just being fools. Kim Min-hee assumes the mantle of being someone in his films who represents a solitude standing apart. Punctuating the stream of conversations, her characters branch away into a p🔴rivate space of their own, sitting by a stream, lying on a beach or stooping to admire flowers on the wayside.

A Spirit of Revisiting

Working with a rotating cabal of actors, the filmmaker likes jigging around pieces of a narrative, glancing at it through myriad angles within a film. Against a wisp of a plot, narrative structures in his films are tweaked around. Often, one scene is played twice, thrice or more. Narrative doubling is a staple. The second act often revisits scenes and specific moments from the first, casting them in a fresh light. In a 2017 interview with National Post, Hong says: “There’s an infinite kind of p𒆙ossibility in ▨our perception and our actions in life”.

Hong is always looking to playfully reorient the narrative axis. In In Another Country (2012), the first of his three collaborations with the French actress, Isabelle Huppert, the figure of the philanderer receives a twist over the tripartite structure. Involving a bare setup of two women and one man, Huppert goes from essaying the character nursing betrayal to embarking on an affair. A stickler for rearranging stories, shifting around positionality of characters across a limited time frame, each of his films reflects a need for constant rediscovery. It is as if he is persistently reappraising the dramatic tone and potential of a situation, weighing it against several permutations. Shots are repeated. Time and again, you are asked to reconsider the certainty of a particular moment, how it actually panned out. The present-ness is pivotal. Like in A Traveller’s Needs (2024), also starring Huppert as a▨ Frenchwoman in Korea, the character’s past is wrapped in mystery. The actress essays a teacher with peculiar methods. Instead of learning bland, cursory remarks for everyday usage, she urges her Korean pupils to dredge up sentences that “hit em𝔉otionally”; thereby, the alien language may be “assimilated” into their hearts.

Small variations in replayed scenes yield a glimmer of what the charactꦍers may be searching.

The reiterations hint at deeper connections in the fragmented parts. In Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000), a fraught love story is told twice from the perspective of the man and woman. The ‘true’ version ♈of the events become amorphous. All his films build towards a sense of osmotic whole, his characters inhabiting a kind of shared universe. Watching them in a composite manner, they blur into an amusing homogeneity.