"The Novelist, the film and happy coincidence": a good, but not a great Hong Sang-soo

In La Romancière, the film and happy coincidence, a film project is an opportunity for the prolific Hong Sang-soo to (re)deploy his universe made of marivaudages, alcohol and symmetries of situations. The recourse to the cinema as a mirror of its characters is not done without clumsiness but the film works.

The detractors of Hong Sang-soo mock his recurrent use of the zoom when they do not speak of formal flatness because his camera is not very mobile. Where on the other hand the framework is always worked. All of this contributes to a way of making cinema to the economy: very low-budget films, quickly shot, sometimes close in terms of canvas, sharing elements of the device (symmetry of situations, narrative correspondences) but drawing their interest small variations around the universe of a Korean filmmaker cousin of Rohmer.

The choice of black and white here is also partly part of the same economy: it was the choice of independent filmmakers who did not have the desire or the means to pay for a cinematographer. Even if the color will end up paying a small visit to the film here present. Just as the zoom is a way for him to decenter/recenter a situation by highlighting the state of mind of one of his characters.

La Romancière, the film and happy coincidence belongs at first sight to the vein of Hong Sang-soo taking as a backdrop the 7th Art such as movie tale. Through a filmmaker, his wife, a has-been actress. But above all decentered through the figure of a writer at the origin of a film project. The filmmaker’s art of correspondence works at full capacity. An act may contradict a word spoken a few moments earlier, a role will have a link with personal experience. And as often with the filmmaker, alcohol will be the best way to unmask the real intentions… or to confess his regrets in love. When the film switches to color, it will be ironic, like a revealing inversion for the characters (real in an “artificial” black and white vs. the artifice of color fiction).

It is unfortunate, however, that the passage to color is also a passage to sentimentality. Element which combined with the somewhat heavy insistence of the story around the idea of charisma prevents the film from being a very good vintage. Who knows, the next vintage may be better…