THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
The South Korean Hong Sang-soo offers the eyes of the spectator an astonishing case: that of a filmmaker who deliberately cast off the comfortable moorings of the industry to take up the maquis of a wild craftsmanship. Since then, his cinema has gone ever further in the purest form, a strategy of permanent shedding of which Of our timehis thirty-second feature film, presented at the close of the Quinzaine des cinéastes at the Cannes Film Festival in May, marks a new stage.
In eighty-four minutes and around twenty shots, this latest film approaches the form of haiku, this miniature poetry that brings together bursts of life and suspended moments. Hong had, for some time now, got rid of technical elegance, to the point of now combining all the positions, from shooting to editing, and thus getting closer to the gesture of the painter. If in this respect it was necessary to find a point of comparison with Of our timeit would probably be with Henri Matisse, although the filmmaker claims to be more of Paul Cézanne, his late drawings or his paper cut-outs: the extreme nudity of the line brings out the motif on the verge of obliteration.
The film is divided between two conversations, where we find certain recurrent Hongian figures: on the one hand, the convalescent woman having broken with her past, on the other, the old poet sensing the approach of death. Sangwon (Kim Min-hee, the filmmaker’s muse and companion), a former actress converted to architecture, lives in Seoul with her friend Jungsoo (Song Seon-mi), a shoemaker, in an apartment where a big hairy cat named “We” wanders around. She is visited by a young admirer, Jisoo (Park Mi-so, a former student of Hong who joined her little troupe), who would also like to become an actress and comes to feed on advice.
Salient details
At the same time, Uiju (Ki Joo-bong, faithful accomplice) also welcomes into his house groupies eager for his oracles: a student, Kijoo (Kim Seung-yun), who is finishing a documentary on him, at the same time as a disciple, Jaewon (Ha Seong-guk), who has come to question him. But the writer has for some time been deprived of alcohol and cigarettes, his cute sins, because of arteries “hardened like concrete”. A wish for sobriety that the presence of visitors makes difficult to respect.
A film by Hong Sang-soo on a dry diet? The thing is surprising for anyone who knows the filmmaker for his Homeric drinking scenes, where soju and makgeolli have long played the role of revealers, breaking down the social mask of the characters by deceiving their resistance. Would we then be dealing with an ersatz, like the non-alcoholic beers whose taste the poet discovers without being able to be satisfied? Not exactly. Let’s say rather that the film is located in the interval between two bottles, one inaugural, sipped in the early morning, and the other conclusive, decapsulated in the very last shot, like an offering.
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