Novelist's film review: Hong Sang-soo gets more personal than ever in a drunken ode to artistic freedom

It's odd to single out a Hong Sang-soo film as particularly "personal": it's not as if one of the prolific Korean author's playful, recursive, and relentlessly idiosyncratic micro-budget works had been retained or made for hire. — but "The Novelist's Film" hits a little differently than most of Hong's recent songs. Why is that?

While it's a bit more airy than "Grass", more accessible than "Introduction" and smoother than "Hotel by the River" (to name just three of the other black-and-white features he has made over the past four years), "The Novelist's Film" is still just another drunken sketch of artistic self-negation. The forcefully nonchalant story it tells - about a low-key frustrated author ambushing an old friend - is fractured in Hong's usual fashion, and its patient frames are populated by many of his usual faces. /p>

Once again, chance encounters lead to long, porous conversations about the past; once again Hong's deceptively sober direction begins to question itself when its characters get drunk. The film's ending is as enigmatic as anything Hong has ever crafted, and the delightful post-credits stinger that follows only adds to its sense of sweetish confusion (stick around to see it - the credits only count). 'about 10 names). < /p> Related Related

This time, however, all of Hong's usual tricks take on a slightly different flavor. Maybe it's because "The Novelist's Film" is lubricated with makgeolli instead of Hong's usual soju (a change as seismic for the Hong Sang-sooniverse as the Spider-Man redesign would be for the MCU). Or maybe it's because the film's successful but unstable protagonist is a writer instead of a director, which ultimately allows him to make his first short with the same depressurized freedom that Hong seeks.



For whatever reason, "The Novelist's Film" and The Novelist's Film seem open-ended instead of self-directed - explanatory instead of confessional. Presenting itself as a bittersweet investigation into what audiences want from their art, Hong's 27th feature gradually begins to rub against the rein of the expectations that artists have for themselves. While his work has always insisted that cinema should expand who we are rather than calcify it, "The Novelist's Film" speaks openly about how the medium's function is determined by its form. Free your art, and your art will free you.

Of course, none of Hong's films would dare to be as prescriptive as I made this one, but it seems fair to say that Jun-hee's (Lee Hye-young) journey away from Seoul is exactly what the doctor ordered. A famous author in her early 60s whose recent creative struggles have left her wondering if she's lost the strength to write, Jun-hee retreats to the quiet suburb where so many of Hong's stories took place. . His plan: to visit an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) who gave up writing to sell it, and take the temperature of civilian life.

The bookstore owned by Jun-hee's friend seems cozy enough, but the tension between the owner and her young employee immediately shows that we're not watching some kind of straight-forward ode to the simple life. When Jun-hee strikes up a conversation, negation is violently polite on both sides; Jun-hee observes that her "natural" and "carefree" friend has put on a lot of weight, while the friend admits that she hasn't read Jun-hee's latest novel because she's exclusively interested in reading. what she wants to read these days, as opposed to what she is supposed to read. Insult. The pendulum would seem to swing away from Jun-hee, but giving up is never really a victory in Hong's book.

From there, Jun-hee visits a local tourist attraction, where she meets a sheepish director (Kwon Hae-hyo) who nearly adapted one of her novels before the project imploded. His attitude towards cinema has since changed. He used to think his life was crap, so he poured his energy into fixing his cinema; now he thinks that fixing his life is the best way to improve his cinema. "Maybe I'm getting old," he concludes, but who isn't? "Everyone is doing their best," adds his wife.

When the three of them literally cross paths with a famous but down-to-earth actress named Kil-soo (Hong's partner Kim Min-hee, who is also credited as the film's production manager) some minutes later, the director resents him for taking some time off and "w...