Even more than Éric Rohmer, the filmmaker to whom he is most often compared, Hong Sang-soo is defined as a director tackling the same subject ad nauseam. To describe his filmography as such, however, misses the way that he has gradually built outwards from recurring themes of male presumptuousness, international dislocation, and the inability of people who talk at length to each other to say anything of value. A suitable frame of reference for his method might be classical composition, particularly something like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, of basic themes attacked from so many different angles that the same fundamental root keeps producing new works of increasingly divergent expressions and forms. In Front of Your Face, as quiet and unadorned as the director’s other films, is in its own way the most radical demonstration of just how far these accumulated variations have sent the director’s recent work away from the “typical” Hong Sang-soo film.
The film begins with a camera pulling out from Sangok (Lee Hye-young) sleeping on the couch of her sister, Jeongok (Yonhee Cho), a motion matched by a subsequent shot pulling back from the window of the high-rise apartment and the view of the Seoul city block below. Hong’s simple style has always called attention to a self-reflexive nature of moviemaking, and the dreamy quality of these shots reflects Sangok’s wistful stirring. An expat recently returned home, the woman, middle-aged but on the cusp of her elder years, Sangok wants to reboot her abandoned career as an actress, but also reconnect with her sister, with whom she has had almost no contact in decades.
This in and of itself is a shift in the usual dynamic between Hong characters. The director’s characters regularly drone on and on about their problems and desires without fully understanding the people to whom they are speaking, which often results in passive-aggressive checks from those correcting assumptions and self-pity. Here, though, both sisters somberly admit that they barely know each other anymore. The deadpan comedy of Hong’s dialogue is nowhere to be found here, replaced by an earnest, if perhaps doomed gesture of reconciliation through honesty. Hampering that, though, are hints scattered throughout that Sangok is hiding something from Jeongok, a circumspect quality that keeps their reunion oddly stiff and formal.
Hong slowly teases out the nature of Sangok’s secret through minute visual cues. The woman regularly cradles her stomach throughout the movie, and at times she speaks with a strained voice at odds with her pleasant demeanor. Grabbing a quick lunch before a meeting, Sangok spills some soup on her blouse, which leaves an ominous, symbolic red blot that she cannot erase. These are obvious symbols, but their importance to advancing the story tacitly reflects Hong increasingly dissolving the barriers between his metatextual approach and his movie-minded narratives. The somber mood generated by such touches also provides an ironic contrast to what is otherwise his most gorgeous film to date, its exteriors glowing from opening the aperture to take in more sunlight for verdant, tranquil backgrounds of riverbanks or florid public parks. Though visibly preoccupied and nervous, Sangok does not take such sights for granted, both for their inherent beauty and for the wistfulness of her homecoming.
At times, it almost feels as if the film that we were watching were something Sangok were daydreaming, something that comes to a head in a lengthy centerpiece where the woman meets with a director (Kwon Hae-hyo) about the possibility of a comeback role. Shot in long takes with minimal movement, the scene turns Hong’s usual conversational awkwardness on its head as Sangok tells the filmmaker what she cannot bring herself to tell her sister regarding her health, which prompts an extreme emotional reaction from the man that erodes the usual barriers of pretension and cluelessness from Hong’s male director figures. As Sangok lays out her desire for one final role, the unbroken shot ensures that all focus remains on her as her quiet, withdrawn behavior to this point is replaced by sudden passion as she confronts her situation and imagines an artistic testament. Of course, her lengthy monologues here are cinematic, and in arguing for a part, she perhaps gives her finest performance.
As with Hong’s other new movie, The Novelist’s Film, In Front of Your Face celebrates the act of making art as a means of combating loneliness, whether induced by the pandemic as it is the other film or a more quotidian sense of fate here. In the coda, Hong’s usual devices reassert themselves: Kwon’s seemingly earnest, open director reveals shades of the usual male narcissism of Hong’s films, and the coda suggests a Mobius strip structure redolent of other structural experiments that litter the filmmaker’s oeuvre. The director has typically foregrounded filmmaking in his work for the clumsy, often sheltered views of those who make movies, but here he revels in the power of film to affirm the lives of people both real and fictional. As Sangok occasionally says, she believes that heaven is somewhere right in front of our faces. What Hong suggests is that this may apply as much to watching cinema as the real world.
Photo courtesy of The Cinema Guild
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