Director Hong Sangsoo’s Latest Suffers a Bit by Comparison

In writing about last year’s “In Front of Your Face,” the 26th feature film by director Hong Sangsoo, I dropped names like Chekhov, Bergman, and Ozu as points of comparison. Mr. Sangsoo’s fable about family, illness, and an unequivocal embrace of faith handily earned those not inconsiderable allusions. As a follow-up, he’s now given us “The Novelist’s Film,” a picture that is notably less ambitious, opting, as it does, for minor pleasures in a meta-vein.One has to wonder, in fact, if Mr. Sangsoo isn’t spinning his wheels a bit. There are lovely moments in “The Novelist’s Film” — including a drunken soiree and a scene involving a little girl besotted with celebrity — and the proceedings benefit from the presence of a veteran television actress with cheekbones to die for, Lee Hyeyoung. Her turn as a novelist who has lost her mojo builds upon the momentum of the actress’s comeback performance in “In Front of Your Face.”Still, “The Novelist’s Film” subsists on its parts and falls flat on the whole. The use of coincidence that occurs during the goings-on (Mr. Sangsoo’s films meander too much for any term so firm as “plot”) comes off as stilted. Notwithstanding the old saying “no coincidence, no story” — its provenance is Chinese, but there must be an equivalent proverb in Korea — the serendipity afoot here smacks less of a universe in synchronous alignment than a filmmaker taking an easy out.Ms. Hyeyoung plays Junhee, a writer of some repute who is given to meditative trains of thought and prickly tete-a-tetes. We first encounter Junhee at an independent bookstore in which she overhears, just out of earshot, a contentious argument. As it turns out, the store is operated by Sewon (Seo Younghwa), an old friend of Junhee who seems to face the world in a perpetual state of befuddlement and concern.Their conversation veers between being cautiously indefinite, overly polite, and ruthlessly confrontational. We learn nothing concrete about their friendship: Junhee hasn’t seen Sewon in years, and the circumstances of their estrangement, though hinted at, aren’t clarified. All the while, Junhee’s behavior is an edgy combination of distraction, familiarity, and resentment. Nor is Junhee the only one suffering from artistic ennui. Sewon is also a writer, but hasn’t done so in many years. Her assistant Hyunwoo (Park Miso) studied to become an actress, but has started taking courses in sign language. A general air of discontentment defines “The Novelist’s Film,” an attribute reinforced by Mr. Sangsoo’s sometimes blistering black-and-white cinematography.The resignation felt by all three women is put into sharp relief when Junhee bumps into the film director Hyojin (Kwon Haehyo) and his wife (Cho Yunhee) while sightseeing at a local tourist attraction. (The movie takes place in an unidentified city outside of Seoul.) Hyojin is having a good run: His recent films have been successful and, though he demurs otherwise, he’s become well off. Junhee bristles at the news. Again, there are suggestions of a past relationship — more commercial than personal, in this case — between the floundering author and the big-name filmmaker.“Again” is, for all intents and purposes, the leitmotif of “The Novelist’s Film.” Later, we meet a poet — another far-flung acquaintance — with whom Junghee had a long-ago fling. Then there’s Kilsoo (the sprightly Kim Minhee), a famous young actress who is in semi-retirement for some reason or another. It’s the rare moment in Mr. Sangsoo’s cosmos in which the motivations and backstory of a given character are made clear. Ambiguity is sometimes indistinguishable from evasiveness.The title of Mr. Sangsoo’s film stems from Junghee’s ambition to become a filmmaker and, at the end of “The Novelist’s Film,” we get glimpses of her cinematic debut. These scenes are in color, presumably to iterate the boundary between experience and reflection and life and art. It’s a curious filip, especially given how workaday Mr. Sangsoo’s cinematography becomes when he allows himself a full chromatic palette.Would that Mr. Sangsoo wasn’t so literal in his machinations, particularly in the scene in which Junghee goes off on a rant about talent, waste, and life. Methinks the director doth protest too much, if I may mix my aphorisms, in the attempt to have his cake and eat it too. “The Novelist’s Film” isn’t a bad picture by any means, but its narrowness of purpose is in direct contradistinction to the depths plumbed in “In Front of Your Face.” Ah, well: Even the best of us have our off days.

Director Hong Sangsoo’s Latest Suffers a Bit by Comparison

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