Tapping Everyday Intimacies

Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo departs from his outsized national cinema with low-budget, chatty dramedies

- Tatsam Mukherjee

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 lightfootedness 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.