Junhee would like to smoke her cigarette on the roof even though there is no smoking allowed. She swears it’s only an e-cigarette, though, and she’s desperately in need of a nicotine hit because the movie she has recently made is currently being screened downstairs to an audience of one. Junhee is not a filmmaker, nor is she a director. Rather, she is a novelist, known to people for her books, not her films. In fact, this is really only her first movie, and maybe if you’re interested, you might like to see it sometime?
But let’s go back to before, when there was no movie — not even a hint of it — and Junhee was just an uninspired novelist catching up with an old friend while sitting outside of a bookstore and smoking that same e-cigarette. She asks her old friend if she still writes anymore to which her old friend bashfully admits that no, she does not. A silence fills the air. There is a sense of shame. Then the conversation carries on. So in lies the crux of director Hong Sang-soo’s recent film, The Novelist’s Film about the despondent lulls of making art and the chance encounters that serve to reanimate an artist’s belief in their craft.
Hong has made an impressive number of films throughout his career, many of which have received various international awards and recognition. The Novelist’s Film fits in perfectly amongst his many movies about the business of art making with its deceptively quiet story about a novelist, Junhee (Lee Hye-young) who goes in search of an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) and who ultimately ends up making a movie with some strangers she meets on her journey.
Much of the film revolves around Junhee and her near-immediate bond with the languishing actress Kilsoo (Kim Min-hee) who she is unexpectedly introduced to by an old acquaintance who once failed to turn one of Junhee’s books into a movie. Junhee and Kilsoo’s friendship drives the film as it effortlessly bolsters the two characters from one serendipitous twist to the next. Lee’s confident yet reserved persona — her character is described as “charismatic” by multiple people throughout the film — pairs well with Seo’s laid back starving artist’s charm. The two women agree to make a movie together, and, just like that, both the actress and the novelist suddenly have renewed interest in their floundering careers.
The Novelist’s Film is predominantly made up of intense conversation between characters. In this way, it shares a resemblance with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy which also deals with chance encounters that rely heavily on dialogue to convey their messages on screen. For some viewers, this deep dive into conversation may feel a bit lilting at times — if you’re not careful, you could easily leave the film thinking that nothing really happened — but that is part of what makes The Novelist’s Film so charming. Its ideas about art making and the importance of continuing one’s work lie within the conversations between the characters who are always, seemingly, in a process of becoming.
At times, the film also feels reminiscent of Olivier Assayas’s recent HBO show, the almost overwhelmingly meta Irma Vep, in that The Novelist’s Film also potentially reflects the director’s own desire to work through their relationship to filmmaking by way of their characters on screen. Here, the movie-within-a-movie concept feels slightly done before, but when we finally get a chance to see a clip from the final product, the stripped-down, dream-like footage doesn’t disappoint. To give away the thing that makes Junhee’s film so powerful would be a disservice to those wanting to see the film — you will just have to find out for yourself — but The Novelist’s Film ultimately ends up speaking, purposefully or not, to the nature of art-making at the hands of women. By film’s end, Hong has made a powerful assertion of the idea that even if an artist has gone dormant from making work, this does not, should not mean that they’ve stopped.
Photo courtesy of The Cinema Guild
The post The Novelist’s Film appeared first on Spectrum Culture.