Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Korean Film Festival in Australia (previously published).
As far as the critical discourse of Korean cinema goes, few filmmakers have a more commanding presence than Hong Sang-soo, whose flowing narratives often feel like chapters in the same grand story. In a sense, his body of work reminds me of some of the 19th century’s most prolific French writers, such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola whose main outputs consisted of
The Human Comedy and the
Rougon-Macquart cycles, which consisted of 91 and 20 volumes respectively. In these exceedingly rich opuses, the French wordsmiths crafted dense worlds, which mirrored the societies they lived in and repeated the same themes and concerns through similar stories and with large casts of revolving characters.
Hong’s output is much less concerned with the high-flown dramatics of the far-reaching stories of these previously mentioned collections. Indeed his films, especially for an uninitiated viewer, offer a vague semblance of banality and rarely fall into the trap of narrative twists or plot contrivances, choosing to focus on the everyday rather than the extremes of life. What he shares with Balzac and Zola is a keen interest in realism. For the French writers this style was labeled naturalism and often explored social injustice and the inescapable force of heredity in the shaping of human characters. While Hong’s films do not share those specific traits, they do exhibit a similarly acute infatuation with repetition. People make the same choices and mistakes over and over again. It’s a funny thing about reviews of Hong’s work but more than most other filmmakers, his whole career tends to be put under the microscope, likely because his films so resemble one another.
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