THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
With his tiny budget films, shot by hand with small crews, and chained to hellish speed (on average two a year), the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is committed to the path of radical shedding – both technical and narrative – which brings it closer in autonomy to the gesture of the painter. So La Romancière, the film and happy coincidence, Silver Bear at the Berlinale 2022, his last film distributed in France, was it boxed in two weeks by Hong himself, as a man-orchestra combining all the positions (production, screenplay, direction, image, editing and music), with the sound engineer as the only other technician. This disconcerting lightness may well have nourished a little cinephile folklore, yet there is nothing derisory about it: it is thanks to it that the work in question takes on an unusual scale with the seasons.
Long devoted to the rout of amorous behavior, Hong Sang-soo’s films have recently fallen back into the sphere of the feminine, its self. After right before your eyes (2022), the filmmaker finds in The Romance… actress Lee Hye-young, glory of the 1980s, and plunges her into a wandering in the present, engaging the past and the future. Jun-hee, her character, is a renowned writer who has come to spend a day strolling in the distant suburbs of Seoul, where a series of encounters will pave the way for renewal. At first, it’s mostly a bittersweet reunion: with an irascible bookseller (Seo Young-hwa) scolding his young employee, a self-satisfied successful director (Kwon Hae-hyo) or an old fellow poet of drinking (Ki Joo-bong), old acquaintances reviving the tensions of the past.
But a ray of sunshine soon sweeps away these gray macerations: the appearance bears the name of Kil-soo (Kim Min-hee, companion of the filmmaker, here credited as production manager), an actress on the sidelines whom the novelist meets at the beautiful middle of a park and whose warm presence inspired him to shoot a film. The presence in the neighborhood of the young nephew of the actress (Ha Seong-guk), a student in cinema equipped for, precisely makes the thing possible.
Meditative and solar vein
The Romance… is therefore, strictly speaking, the story of a regeneration, or how a woman of letters ends up swapping her pen for a camera and reinventing herself as a filmmaker. This medium of artists in transit, Hong Sang-soo captures it in its usual terms – one would be tempted to say “without ceremony” -, according to frontal and continuous takes, between scenes of table and walk, making the good part to the actors. In the seasonal rays of Hongian filmography, The Romance… belongs to the range of winter tales shot in a beautiful black and white gradient (Quiet mornings in Seoulin 2011, Hotel by the Riverin 2018, etc).
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