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Hong Sang-soo THE cinema of good drinking
The theater billboard is experiencing right now, in secret, the bloodiest battle imaginable.
If we put James Cameron's
Avatar
: The Sense of Water on one side, and Hong Sang-soo's
The Novelist and His Film
on the other, two opposing ways of understanding cinema, art, and life confront each other.
They fight, or, even worse, they ignore each other, which hurts more
.
Because, unlike the ubiquitous Avatar, The Novelist and his movie, he barely exists.
Its market price is zero.
It is a film that, rather than being shown in theaters, is hidden from them.
The proposal by its prolific Korean director (this is
his 27th film and he has already finished his 28th and 29th
) is once again a simple and dazzling game of mirrors and mazes where both the most intimate despair of the characters and that of each one of us.
It is cinema built from
the eroticism of feelings
and with basic elements that have nothing to do with the fascination for strange worlds but rather with the estrangement of one's own world, ours.
It is cinema made with tools as simple as heartbreak and soju, (the Korean national drink).
The Novelist and Her Film
is the story of a writer who doesn't get the words, the voice, or the story right.
In crisis and abandoned, an actress crosses her path and
offers to make a short film with her, a simple film
where what is relevant is simply emotion.
Let's say that this last sentence is the best description of the permanent state of revolt and commotion in which Sang-soo's work has lived since his first short film for film school entitled
Beef
.
So, the idea was to shoot a woman eating a steak.
Nothing more.
And so until he found an actress... vegetarian
.
Sang-soo's cinema feeds precisely on chance, on the whim of life.
Always live and always alive.
A lazy person will say that his films are always the same: stories about artists who talk about anguish, heartbreak and misunderstandings, about communication.
The action is nothing more than the movement of an endless conversation in a prosaic and generally static setting in which alcohol, spontaneous philosophy and melancholy abound.
Yes, each movie is a repetition of the previous one because it cannot be otherwise
.
The sense and meaning emerges from each variation.
The director recounted in a recent meeting at a retrospective in New York that his life changed before a still life by Cezanne.
«I was impressed by the relationship between
the abstract and the concrete
.
When I see his paintings I never get bored.
I can look at them forever," he said.
For Sang-soo, reality is not a valid concept.
"It's a sometimes convenient word because we live in community and, on a practical level, we need it.
But the reality is something else.
Life, phenomena, whatever, is always a trillion times more complex and mysterious than any logical sentence.
It is impossible to grasp what is happening.
Even if I wanted to describe what I feel right now, 10 seconds of my experience, it would take me billions of years.
A person cannot objectively describe a reality.
Somehow, all the cinema of this disciple in his own way, both of Robert Bresson and of Luis Buñuel and of Éric Rohmer can be explained through the previous paragraph.
His filmography revolves around the intimate certainty that everything we see on the screen is nothing more than a transparent negation of, in fact, what is being contemplated.
When at the end of
La novelista y su película
the actress attends the screening of the short film devised with the writer,
the screen will be flooded with a color close to the miracle
and as close to the unheard of as it is to the truth and, why not, to love. .
It becomes clear then why it is Hong Sang-soo, not Bong Joon-ho, who is the greatest of Korean directors, and probably also of living film directors.
Otherwise, the opposite of
avatar
.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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