Hong’s finest film in a while tackles work, life, art, love, past and future with effortless ease, as an art lecturer asks his famous but blacklisted uncle to help her students mount a skit.
Review #2,906
Dir. Hong Sang-soo
2024 | South Korea | Drama | 111min | 1.85:1 | Korean
PG13 (passed clean) for smoking scenes
Cast: Kim Min-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee, Ha Seong-guk, Kang So-yi
Plot: After a scandal breaks out among several students involved in the production of a skit, a lecturer at a South Korean women’s college brings in her uncle, a famous actor, to bring the work to fruition.
Awards: Won Best Performance & Nom. for Golden Leopard (Locarno)
International Sales: Finecut
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Art & Creation; Relationships; Work & Life
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Filmgarde Kallang (as part of the Singapore International Film Festival)
Spoilers: No
Hongheads will likely rejoice more than usual with his latest By the Stream, which could be his finest film in recent years. At this point, Hong Sang-soo has become quite the unlikely cult icon of Korean cinema, perhaps even in world cinema.
No one else does it like him, film after film, comfort food after comfort food. He doesn’t need to rely on violence, drugs and sex, in other words, transgressive content that most cult directors exploit to their advantage… just lots of smoking, drinking and eating.
His is a cinema of purity and reassurance; his followers know that and somehow Hong has made no-frills filmmaking not just his trademark but also a marvel of simplicity.
Kim Min-hee, in a Locarno Best Performance display, plays Jeo-nim, an art lecturer who asks his famous but blacklisted uncle to help her students mount a new skit, after their initial idea collapsed when the student director unwittingly left the project after a dating scandal.
“I hope we continue to keep in touch.”
We see Jeo-nim sketching by the stream, which informs the film title, in several scenes that remind us that Hong isn’t just fantastic in conversational screenwriting, he seems a bit more intent in making his poetic side more visible.
In fact, it is already telling that this is a markedly different film from his usual fare when we only hear non-diegetic music a long way into the picture (he normally has a simple piece of melody bookend his films)—in a scene that sees Jeo-nim stopping in front of an autumnal tree and picking up a fallen leaf.
By the Stream is also a far lengthier work but rightly deserves its two-hour-shy duration as it deals with more characters and ‘issues’ that have befallen them. Whether work, life, art, love, past or future, Hong tackles almost everything with effortless ease, frequently in long takes.
I daresay this is the closest that Hong has gotten to making an Eric Rohmer film, even if critics have eternally drawn way too convenient comparisons between them over the decades.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 