Hong Sang-soo Makes a Subtle, Striking Shift in By the Stream
Although many Hong Sang-soo signatures are present in his newest film—scenes written the morning of; long, inebriated talks over delicious meals; lovely performances from his regular players—By the Stream marks a subtle but striking shift in his preoccupations and artistry.
Jeon-im (Kim Min-hee, a rare, true movie star), an arts professor at a women’s college in Seoul, spends her free moments sketching the patterns of a local stream, to be woven on her loom later. When she’s not creating her own textile art, she’s teaching her small group of performance art students. The harmony of the group is thrown off course when the male student director from another university dates three of her female students at the same time, with only one week left until the big theater performance. To solve this quickly, Jeon-im asks her estranged uncle Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo), a widely celebrated stage actor/director, to write a new script and finish directing the project. To her surprise, he gladly obliges. Unbeknownst to Jeon-im, her bone-deep sense of solitude runs in the family, so he’s happy for the artistic exercise and sense of community. Jeon-im introduces him to her boss, Professor Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), who was already quite fond of him from afar.
Together, the three form a brief artistic family in their collective responsibility to compassionately guide the four female students left in the class into a more mature artistic practice and way of thinking. For my money, I have never seen a Hong film in which the main focus throughout the film is pointed at the essential human capacity to protect and comfort each other, across age groups. One small, wordless scene in which Jeon-im and her students hold each other on a blanket on a grassy campus lawn at night stands out for its simplicity; a direct image that expresses its central idea without insisting upon itself.
“When I write something, I don’t mean for a sentence to mean something else. I hope these concrete sentences become a part of a bigger concrete thing that cannot be easily analyzed or explained away,” Hong told the press the morning of the Locarno premiere. Hong achieves this by giving his actors the scenes the day of shooting. Without a full script, the actors are unable to psychoanalyze their characters beforehand, freeing them up to make more spontaneous choices in the moment. This is not a new technique for the auteur, but it is one that works exceedingly well in By the Stream.
Another of Hong’s signature moves is to encourage his actors to actually drink during drinking scenes, which his films are famous for. While this may sound strange, the favorite topic of all three lead actors present at the press conference was the pleasure they derive from on-set drinking—how it loosens them up and presents more unforeseen nuances in their performances. “This is my 11th film with Hong, and I drank during all of them,” remarked Kwon. “I look forward to the 12th.”