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Hong Sang-soo (director), In Water, 2023. 61 min.

Of the 31 features Hong Sang-soo has directed, you’d be hard pressed to find a bad film. As well as being one of the most prolific directors alive (his debut feature dates back to only 1996), he is one of the most unerringly consistent. And yet, there aren’t all that many of those films that stand out as masterpieces (I might venture Night and Day [2007] and On the Beach at Night Alone [2017] but arguments can also be made for others). As with Éric Rohmer, the director he is most often compared to, the entire body of work—with its repeated themes and subtle variations, its persistent talkativeness, its familiar actors (among them Kim Min-hee, Kim Sang-joong, Kwon Hae-yo, Kim San-kyung, Moon So-ri, the late Lee Sun-kyun) and its apparent lack of style (other than a penchant for weird sudden zooms)—is the masterpiece.

It has to be said though that it’s hard to imagine the earnestly Catholic Rohmer ever making thinly veiled autobiographical films that cast film directors in such an unflattering light, spending their afternoons boozing on soju and chasing skirt and occasionally being shamed by chance encounters with past conquests. When Hong and his favourite leading lady Kim Min-hee admitted to an extramarital affair in 2017, it wasn’t exactly a redounding revelation.

^{The film is shot mostly out of focus}

In Water, the sixth of Hong’s films to be released in the past two years (with another to come later this year), diverges from the mean more than usual, even if a lot of the familiar tropes are there in abundance. The film, like many that have gone before it in Hong’s oeuvre, is a three-hander, with a young director (yet another Hong regular, Shin Seok-ho) at a loss for inspiration trying to make a film on Jeju island with two collaborators, one male (Ha Seong-guk) and one female (Kim Seung-yoon). It differs radically, however, in that the film is shot mostly out of focus (only a handful of interior scenes have industry-standard sharpness). This is announced to the audience in a title card at the outset, which adds that, far from it being a technical error, it is a choice on the director’s part.

It seems Hong chose to give the film a blurry patina to reflect the blocked nature of the protagonist’s creative process. There is also the possibility that the image is blurred to give it the shimmering ephemerality appropriate to a draft, which would be a consummate artifice given the film is otherwise constructed and mounted as meticulously as any of Hong Sang-soo’s 30 other films. And maybe the blur is intended to give the film an ethereal feel—one film it reminded me of visually is Agnès Varda’s not-quite-so-translucent Le Bonheur. Whichever of these it is, it is clearly intended to signal a detour in the director’s work, and at just one hour long, it is a swift one, even for Hong, a man who is not usually given to longevity in his features.

But the film’s lack of cinematographic clarity notwithstanding, In Water is unmistakably a Hong Sang-soo film, and would be instantly recognised as such by anyone who has seen more than one or two of his previous movies. In a way, the title card warning at the beginning is superfluous as it’s hard to imagine anyone straying into a cinema showing an hour-long Korean film, or not knowing in advance what it’d be like. The two dozen people at the screening I watched all clearly knew what they were getting themselves in for. As for Hong’s motives in making this film, perhaps it was also a way of just working through a blockage, improbable as that situation might seem for a director who turns out films at such a dizzying rate. And slight as In Water might appear to be, it is no blot on Hong Sang-soo’s copy book. It keeps up the quality you expect from the man. It’s just that little bit different.

How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Just that Little Bit Different: Hong Sang-soo’s In Water.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 10 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/10/in-water.

Oliver Farry is from Sligo, Ireland. He works as a writer, journalist, translator and photographer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and gorse, among other publications. Visit his website for more information. [All texts by Oliver Farry.] [Oliver Farry and chajournal.blog.]

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