TIFF '24: "By the Stream" could be a good introduction to the cinema of Hong Sang-soo

by Cláudio Alves

There's an odd comfort in seeking the new Hong Sang-soo film at any given festival. Thanks to the speed at which the Korean auteur runs through production, you'll usually find one. He regularly premieres multiple features every year. Earlier in 2024, he won the Silver Bear at Berlin with A Traveler's Needs. A few months later, he was at Locarno, ready to present his overall 32nd feature-length project, By the Stream, which took the Best Performance award for Kim Min-hee's work. This second project also made it to TIFF, delighting loyal fans with a new Hong that's much like all the other Hongs that came before. That's not a dig, merely a recognition of the director's remarkable consistency…

Since 2021's Introduction, Hong Sang-soo has been working as his cinematographer – not to mention cameraman, sound technician, editor, composer, etc. In the evolution of the director's style, that change represents an accentuation of the artist's priorities, moving progressively away from form, toward a text-and-performance-based cinema. However, one shouldn't automatically dismiss Hong's mastery over the audiovisual properties of his chosen artform. Some odd experiments, like 2023's deliberately blurry In Water, and a newfound emphasis on the staging possibilities of zooms contradict such notions.

Though the habitué viewer doesn't come to a Hong flick expecting the dazzlement of sight and sound, there's care behind every frame as By the Stream so eloquently showcases. Consider its opening salvo and leitmotif - a woman sitting by the stream. She's Jeonim, an art instructor at the local all-women university, and every morning she stares at the whirlpool currents of the water, focused on capturing its particular lines. Patterns of circular movement will hopefully be synthesized in Jeonim's work with textile and tapestry. But for now, she looks, lost in the careful observation of patterns others will just as easily pass by without a second thought. She's like her director in that way.

Overexposed to the heights of digital glare, the shot would look amateurish if not for the modest elegance of its composition. Contrasted against the soft curves Jeonim patiently considers, her figure is staged by architectural lines cutting across the frame in strong diagonals. The eye is guided by Hong's invisible hand and the final point of contemplation is always the same – Jeonim, played by the director's romantic partner, most crucial creative collaborator and muse, Kim Min-hee. Various scenes along By the Stream's gently meandering 111 minutes will function just as this shot does, seemingly casual in construction yet ruled by the gravitational pull of the leading lady.

It's a fascinating state of affairs when one realizes just how stubbornly ambivalent Jeonim is, caught in nested limbos of her own making, often paralyzed and resentful of those who can move ahead when she cannot. When we meet her, she's trying to find a solution for an unforeseen issue with the university's upcoming sketch play festival. The theater director assigned to her department had to go when, from seven students, he managed to seduce three and date them all at the same time. In this conundrum, it fell on Jeonim to find a substitute, so she called on a favor from Uncle Chu Sieon, a once-celebrated stage actor who left that life years ago for some mysterious reason.

Though bound by familial connection, neither uncle or niece are especially close, imbuing every conversation with a tentative trepidation and the need to compensate for an intimacy both feel should be there, yet isn't. Pat pleasantries are a conversational constant, as they usually are in Hong's cinema. Sieon might say Jeonim hasn't changed in an attempt at warmth, but she'll quickly disagree and offer no more explanation, nor even a comparable compliment to smooth things over. If they were to be sincere, the two might realize they're each lost in some solipsistic personal journey, searching for themselves in vicious cycles that forever seem to lead nowhere.

Only, that might be about to change for Sieon, whose skit project comes with a barrage of memory, nostalgia, and a romantic connection to sweeten the deal. Not to one of the students, like that lecherous director of yore, but to Jeonim's department head, Jeong. The first scene shared between the three is a miraculous piece of simple staging and patient humor, with Hong extending the conversation past the point of social absurdities. There are no cuts, only zooms to separate sections of the dialogue, delineating how much Sieon and Jeong are taken by the other's presence. In no time, parallel conversations are happening within a group of three, and Hong loses much time cataloguing how his actors can create bubbles around themselves.

Kim Min-hee, in particular, is brilliant at peppering behavioral sketches throughout the extended scenes. She projects vexation with something as simple as a mulish silence in the place where a random hum would be politer, and can disconnect entirely by making Jeonim suddenly mesmerized with the wood grain of a table. Watching those three in their cyclical get-togethers, often around beer and eel, is one of By the Stream's greatest pleasures. It's also a reflection and practical example of what Sieon is there to teach the university students, and, by extension, Hong's audience. Indeed, at its most explicative, By the Stream can feel like an educational entry point into the director's oeuvre.

Constructed out of sketches where very little happens beyond the granular details of human interaction, By the Stream is about the construction of said sketches. The play competition that moves the meager plot leads to various moments of instruction, whereupon Sieon assumes his declared role as a Hong alter-ego cum self-insert. According to the man, form must shape itself to the play's set limitations, and the proposed script is one of little consequential dialogue, mostly short sentences. The attention of both actor and audience must thus be directed toward tone shifts and gestures, the pauses and varying rhythms of response. It's a teaching moment for those within the scene and without.

It's also a chance for Hong to prepare the viewer outright and be done with self-justifications, proposing a narrative on his terms and under an umbrella of intentional clarity. Such directness results in counterintuitive nuance elsewhere, as if the director has given himself the chance to be radically diffuse in storytelling now that he's explained the point of it all. Many scenes hinge on Kim Min-hee's ability to thread the line of Jeonim's transparency, how she mediates her inner self and negotiates what society sees. Other moments are allowed to be a whisper in the wind, merely catching a huddle of girls in the night, congregating around a flame in search of comfort and confidence.

Some of the funniest and most gentle filmmaking in Hong Sang-soo's recent work can be found in By the Stream. The return of the disgraced director is an outright farce, with galaxies of irritation flashing across Kim's mutinous visage. Other conversations bring about the possibility of miracles, of transcendence in a mundane reality where such grace seems impossible. It's the sublime contained within a casually shared memory, a familiar register that reaches its highest point during a post-performance meal. Hong hurries Kim off-stage to build the scene singularly around the meeting of generations. 

Between Kwon Hae-hyo's old actor and his young student players, a camaraderie of sorts is permitted to blossom, regrets and wishes so striking when considered through the prism of different stages of life. The sequence is pure Hong, almost depurated to its basest form, transforming, expanding as melancholy turns to despair turns to light humor turns to hurt and absolution. It also goes beyond the well-trodden territory of Hong's stories, reaching for a kind of sentimentality that's rare in the director's cinema. It seems he's growing soft in his old age, lulled by the autumnal breeze and his character's journeys. They look for themselves but end up looking for love, or else they draw inward and vanish, only to pop up in a cheeky freeze frame to bid the audience adieu. Until next time, for Hong's 33rd feature - it should be almost ready by now.

By the Stream played in the Centerpiece and Luminaires sections at TIFF. It will also be screened in the NYFF main slate later this month.