THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE
Imperceptibly, perhaps, for several films, surely, Hong Sang-soo’s cinema seems inhabited by new preoccupations, new obsessions, sweet and cruel at the same time. Formal and temporal conciseness is resolutely imposed, the story becomes more and more ghostly. It is up to the spectator to reconstitute it from scattered and sedimented moments, during which characters are shown of whom we do not know if what they experience, at this moment, is insignificant or essential, dreamlike. or reality. No doubt because, in the cinema of the author of Day the pig fell into the wellthese terms sometimes cease to contradict each other.
Like so many tableaux, the sequences, in very long shots, follow one another
Introduction is marked by a progression in three stages, in three motifs, that of waiting, of embrace and finally of an undecidable suspension, of an interrogation which takes the filmmaker out of his first preoccupations. Consider the fate of Youngho, a young man called by his doctor father to join him, but whom the latter makes wait in a waiting room, where he meets a friend of this invisible parent, an actor; meeting that will make him want, he will say, to practice this profession. Either that of Juwon, his girlfriend who went to study in Germany, or that of their respective mothers, or that of a middle-aged actor (the one in the waiting room), angry, big soju drinker, with strong opinions about drama, that of a nurse who thinks she shares a memory with Youngho and tells him so, while smoking a cigarette in the cold.
fundamental spring
Like so many tableaux, the sequences, in very long shots, sequences whose consecutive relationship does not always appear obvious, follow one another. Hong Sang-soo mixes these different individuals, characters that each moment, each block of space and time, plunges into sometimes tragicomic, sometimes trivial, sometimes dreamlike situations.
The situations of expectation of the first moments are followed by those where an embrace, sometimes sudden and unexpected (the one between Yougho and the nurse), seeks its causality, as if the initial desire were untraceable. It is undoubtedly to make this first gesture rhyme that the moment occurs when Youngho, of whom we learn that he wants to become an actor, is literally garlanded by the old actor, who reproaches the young man for the scruples he would have to play a kiss scene.
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