Double helping of Hong Sangsoo’s little things with ‘Our Day’ and ‘In Water’ | Culture

Released consecutively today Friday and next week, Our day and In Water are two sides of the same coin: the unique and prolific creative universe of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo (Seoul, 63 years old). Light on luggage and with his troupe A regular performer, the author of Grass (2018) shows twice the brief nature of his cinema, his abstraction of the small things that make up the course of life. While Our day It captures the poetics of everyday life in a comic key, In Water It is a curious 61-minute formal experiment in which almost everything happens out of focus.

The first is pure Hong Sangsoo. The film focuses on the day of an actress who stays at a friend’s house and falls in love with her cat. On the other hand, it focuses on the day of a poet who, while being filmed by a young woman, cannot help but think about the absence of his old pet and other simple pleasures that are forbidden to him today, such as alcohol and tobacco. Kim Min-hee and Song Seon-mi, in the skin of the two friends, come face to face again, as in The woman who escaped (2020), to offer his most comical side.

The director once again structures almost all the scenes around a table, where everyday elements of life and simple traces of conversation are placed. There is no lack of the omnipresent alcohol, but also that box of gifts (creams, soaps and other cosmetics) that Kim Min-hee’s character receives from a young visitor (Park Mi-so) and which she goes through one by one with delightful humour.

Meanwhile, in the other house, and in front of another table, lower and more uncomfortable, the poet played by the wonderful actor Ki Joo-bong is revealing his brief and accurate thoughts between non-alcoholic beers. The intimate and funny dynamic between the poet and the young woman who records him (Kim Seung-yun) is broken when a visitor arrives (Ha Seong-guk), who, with his questions, all too big, finds the value of the small answers. “We have to be grateful for the small things, learn to value them and stop thinking about meanings,” the poet tells her in a glorious final stretch.

In Water is an even smaller film in which Hong Sangsoo does everything but act. He is the producer, screenwriter, director of photography, editor and composer of the music for a work that turns the gag of the out-of-focus character of Taking Harry Apart, Woody Allen’s film, in the central idea.

The filming of a short film amateur It is an excuse to explore a very curious impressionist texture. The film, 80% out of focus, including the end credits, is somewhat disconcerting, perhaps because the mist that envelops the screen, which does not affect the intimacy that Hong’s films provoke, expresses a formal pictorial ambition: the filmmaker has once told of the revelation that it was for him, when he was studying in Chicago, to discover Cézanne’s still lifes, his famous apples.

In a recent book, Dennis Lim, director of the New York Film Festival, explores A tale of cinema, The 2005 film that many consider to be the pinnacle of his already long filmography. Lim deconstructs the film to talk about the hallmarks of a very elusive work, from the use of zoom to the presence of his loyal actors. He also talks about his connection with filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, David Lynch or John Cassavetes, with whom he shares a fondness for alcohol and, above all, for observing drunkenness in others, something that also links him to Yasujirô Ozu. Nineteen years have passed since that film and Hong Sangsoo, who will premiere another one in a month at the Locarno festival, continues his course apart from everything. The search remains the same: to touch the essential with the minimum. In the end, everything is superfluous in the South Korean films. And increasingly, so are the explanations.