English Title: The Woman Who Ran
Korean Title: 도망친 여자/Domangchin yeoja/A Woman Who Ran Away
Premiere Date: February 25, 2020
U.S. Release Year: 2021
Festival: Berlin (Best Director)
Film Number: 24
First Viewing Number: 24
First Viewing Date: October 5, 2020
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 10
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 27
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 27
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 10
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 77 minutes (23rd longest)
Color/Black & White: Color
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Three equal parts, different screen partners
Recurring Actors: Seo Young-hwa (eighth appearance), Kim Min-hee (seventh appearance), Kwon Hae-hyo (sixth appearance), Song Seon-mi (fifth appearance), Kim Sae-byuk (third appearance), Shin Seok-ho (third appearance), Lee Eun-mi (first appearance), Ha Seong-guk (first appearance)
Season: Autumn
Weather: Sunny, rainy
Alcohol: Makgeolli, white wine
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Water, coffee
Food: Apples, grilled meat, pasta, bread, grapes
Drinking Scenes: 3
Creative People: Dance producer, film programmer, architect, poet/writer
Academia: History teacher
Vacation: 1-3
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: 1
Films Within Films: 1-2
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Wife-husband
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: N/A
Number of Shots: 28
Number of Zooms: 17 out, 24 in
Music Style: Tinny synth piano and strings, strummed guitar
Title Background: First shot (no logo)
Voiceover: N/A

It really was a shock to us Hongians when Hong didn’t release a film in 2019. Despite Filipe Furtado’s delightful assertion that Martín Rejtman made sure that a year didn’t pass without a new Hong film with his amazing short “Shakti,” owing to health issues, Hong took the year off, making it the first year without a Hong since 2007, just barely missing making a film in every year of the 2010s. But it’s somewhat fitting that Hong returned with a film as seemingly unassuming yet beautiful as The Woman Who Ran. It’s maybe the first one (with the possible exception of Yourself and Yours), at least since I started receiving his films as they premiered, that the reception of nearly everyone on first viewing was of a more general appreciation, before growing in many people’s minds to become a major work. Hong’s films always linger in the mind, but this one strikes even more of a pensive mood.

Much of this comes from the renewed focus on Kim; despite the very sensible tendency of calling late Hong films as Kim-led films, this is really the first film since On the Beach at Night Alone that’s solely led by Kim, whereas the others since have had her explicitly as an observer or as a co-lead with someone else, either a man or Huppert. She is our guide once again, moving through, as Sean and Evan’s correspondence (probably their best) put it, three different pathways through middle age. While not as specifically death-obsessed as either of the past two films, and once again returning to color (mostly), there is a general sense of stasis here, comfortable experiences and/or relationships that Gam-hee comes close to disrupting while never quite piercing the veil.

One of the things most noted about The Woman Who Ran is the near-idyllic nature of its female-dominated storylines, with the inclusion of men as deliberate, unwelcome intrusions. This is certainly true throughout, but I found myself unexpectedly moved by a specific component. While Young-soon (Seo Young-hwa) and Su-young (Song Seon-mi) are played by two of Hong and Kim’s most prolific and notable collaborators, both essentially co-leading their sections in On the Beach at Night Alone and Hotel by the River, Woo-jin is played by Kim Sae-byuk, who played Chang-sook, the mistress in The Day After, and Ji-young in Grass (aka the woman who ran up the stairs).

In narrative terms, she embodies a similar role as in the former film: she has essentially replaced Kim’s character in a relationship with Kwon Hae-hyo’s character Jung. But the tonal register is entirely different: I had remembered the initial encounter as being mildly hostile, instead of the genuine and awkward curiosity that both women have upon seeing each other again. It’s almost like a mea culpa, or a reconciliation made impossible in that earlier film, and the metatextual nature of this scene, and its breezy dismissals of Jung, made me genuinely emotional.

While it’s true that this third section breaks from the neat, planned visits to old friends’ living spaces, the structure as a whole contained more variances than I remembered: there are brief conversations that the other women have before Gam-hee arrives in the first and third section (in addition to apples) while Su-young is alone; the two days-one night structure of the first section is met by two neatly bisected conversations in the other two parts. And an extraordinary linking gesture that I hadn’t noticed at all before that aren’t the mountain zooms: Gam-hee stirs a drink in her first conversation in each part, although it’s coffee with a spoon in the second two parts and makgeolli with a chopstick in the first part.

I had also forgotten that, while the men are predominately shot from the back — a neat little reversal of the conversation immediately preceding the first confrontation about the mean rooster who pecks out the feathers of the hens to prove his dominance — their faces are clearly visible, especially in the second and third. Furthermore, there’s something considerably more ambiguous about the second one than I had remembered, and the shot of Gam-hee exiting the second part bears more than a passing resemblance to the shot of Ha Seong-guk — in his first of now many Hong appearances — sadly walking away. This also happens in the shot of Gam-hee looking at the security footage; the first time she does it, it feels like it’s emphasizing the distance between her and the comforting taking place on the screen, but this time it’s closer to the role she had in the early stages of Grass; the door lock in the former reminds me of the one in The Day He Arrives.

Speaking of Grass, this likely forms a recurring role for Seo, though they aren’t named the same. In that film, Seo’s character Sung-hwa explained that she couldn’t take in Chang-soo because she was living in the country with a roommate, a situation that’s a perfect match for her living style in the first part. This is also the first Hong that more-or-less explicitly has a queer couple, who will delightfully turn up again in In Front of Your Face: I had forgotten that Young-jin (Lee Eun-mi) is the one who fields most of Shin Seok-ho’s questions during the robber cats scene, and in general I love how content she is to remain in the background. In the last shot of the first part, it is the friends Gam-hee and Young-soon who have their arms around each other, while Young-jin, respectful of the shared history her partner and her partner’s friend have had, follows along behind.

The robber cats scene really is one of Hong’s greatest scenes and shots, the cat perfectly posing as a button on the scene, and it’s made all the more richer by the conversation that Gam-hee and Young-soon have earlier about cow eyes and consciousness. They remark on the great beauty of cows’ eyes, and the latter discusses briefly the separation between the consciousness of the mind, which can interact easily with cows and other animals, and the instinct of the body, a dialectic that neatly sums up the indecision of many Hong protagonists. In this light, the confrontation boils down not to neighbor etiquette, but to the very nature of how animals should be considered: as a being that should be nurtured like a human or not. The intelligence of the pose offers Hong’s answer.

It really is striking how little the viewer learns about Gam-hee as a character, aside from her husband’s history teaching position and the fact that they haven’t spent a day apart in five years. But while I think it’s too much to suggest that she must be in an unhappy marriage, her musings that she goes out less because she doesn’t want to say things she doesn’t need to see or do things she doesn’t want to do feels like it cuts both ways. The way of the Hongian protagonist is to get into precisely those interactions, even in his more sedate films, and this film very much functions as a breaking of that shell for Gam-hee, an exposure to mysteries like the third floor. Of course, there’s no indication that these are specifically sequential encounters, whether these might be dreams/repetitions or taking place weeks or years apart, but the flow is so smooth that I’m inclined to see them as taking place in a “real” diegesis.

The film screening(s) is one of Hong’s most openly cinephilic gestures in a long while, probably not met since Right Now, Wrong Then. (The other audience member in the first screening is Darcy Paquet, probably the preeminent Korean-to-English subtitle translator, who did Parasite among many others.) For one, it might actually be the first time he’s actually showed a film projected on screen unless I’m misremembering; every other Hong film-within-the-film has either been presented as “real” or played off-screen in the theater with only the sound as proof that something is being shown. The serenity of the image in both black-and-white and color, along with it potentially playing the same image at both the beginning and end, almost suggests a slow cinema film.

Of course, the switch from the first to the second, precipitated by her conversations with Woo-jin and Jung — her assertion that he repeats himself over and over, which makes his comments insincere, and his claim that the stress of quitting smoking is worse than the cigarettes themselves, offer plenty to ponder over — suggests an opening of her perception, an ability to finally see live not in monochrome but in living color. But this time I decided not to see the film as communicating such a clear arc, but instead as these miniature portraits, dances of common understanding among women that evoke so much about a change to a living style set in its ways. In that light, it’s as major as they come.

English Title: Hotel by the River
Korean Title: 강변 호텔/Gangbyun Hotel
Premiere Date: August 9, 2018
U.S. Release Year: 2019
Festival: Locarno (Best Actor)
Film Number: 23
First Viewing Number: 15
First Viewing Date: November 13, 2018
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 22
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 26
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 18
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 23
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 96 minutes (11th longest)
Color/Black & White: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear with parallel protagonists
Recurring Actors: Gi Ju-bong (ninth appearance), Yoo Joon-sang (ninth appearance), Kim Min-hee (sixth appearance), Kwon Hae-hyo (fifth appearance), Song Seon-mi (fourth appearance), Shin Seok-ho (second appearance)
Season: Winter
Weather: Snowy, sunny
Alcohol: Soju, makgeolli, white wine
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Tom N Toms Coffee, water
Food: Tofu soup, cake, cheese, red bean soup
Drinking Scenes: 2
Creative People: Poets, film director
Academia: N/A
Vacation: 2
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: 1
Q&A: N/A
Naps: 6
Family: Father-sons
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 3
Number of Shots: 58
Number of Zooms: 23 out, 14 in
Music Style: Dramatic synth piano and strings
Title Background: White background drawn with spoken credits/Black background for closing credits
Voiceover: 2

Maybe this is the case with most directors with a small but strong following, but I tend to feel that the most popular and/or “conventional” Hongs tend to pose a challenge to the most die-hard of Hong acolytes. Whether it be the more straightforward bifurcation of Right Now, Wrong Then or the extranational star presence of the Hupperts, the noted uptick in relative reception can put up something of a smokescreen for his more particular idiosyncrasies. No film demonstrates that better than Hotel by the River, which still resolutely remains one of his lesser films for me, especially compared to Grass, albeit one that still retains something quite moving and unclassifiable within its more discernible narrative.

Before talking about that, however, I have to touch on the handheld cinematography, which remains totally inexplicable to me. Hong’s opening voiceover — which reminds me of Welles, and remains the only time he’s technically been in his own films, even if my friends and I are convinced that he’d be marvelous as an actor (or in cameos) — takes the unusual step of mentioning the shooting period of January 29 to February 14, 2018, which, given his ordinarily short shooting schedule, suggests this wasn’t a decision borne of a time-crunch. I initially thought on this rewatch that there might be a shift to static cameras for the final scenes, but it appears to remain handheld for every single shot. If I had to venture an interpretation, it’d point to the frailty shared between the protagonists, but that’s a bit of a stretch. I got used to it after a while, and it doesn’t strictly detract from my appreciation of the film, but it’s still a seemingly arbitrary choice/experiment, especially given his swift return to tripods.

After eight supporting performances, Gi Ju-bong finally gets to lead a Hong film, and he truly is wonderful. Even though he was only in his early 60s at the time this was made, he still brings a palpably more wearied presence only really suggested before by Moon Sung-keun, though of course he only led part of Oki’s Movie. While he technically shares leading status with Kim Min-hee, once again playing a character named Ah-reum — it’s quite neat that this three-film black-and-white run forms something of a loose trilogy of films where Kim/Ah-reum is a co-lead — it is his narrative that defines the film, while Kim embodies something more ethereal and abstract, appropriately caught in stasis.

Hotel by the River feels even more stripped down than The Day After, if only because the character relationships ultimately become far simpler: there are the father and his two sons, and the two friends, with only a hotel worker to occupy another speaking part. Like in Grass, there’s an off-screen owner of the principal setting — who has an unidentified dispute with Young-hwan — and a sojourn to a restaurant, but that was comparatively filled with characters and incidents. The hotel isn’t shown quite enough to make it feel truly deserted, but the fall of snow, even more sudden than the aftermath shown in Oki’s Movie, makes it feel beautifully desolate, these interactions playing against essentially a blank canvas, the impersonality of the Hotel Heimat (German for home, of course, in a film where you can’t go home again) letting the fairly set relationships play out. It’s certainly no coincidence how many naps there are; even Kyung-soo gets one while he’s waiting for Byung-soo to find their father.

Hotel by the River really strikes me most in how deeply it takes family as its central focus, to an even greater degree than Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, which refracted its portrait of a daughter through her relationships with others. Ah-reum’s plot with Yeon-joo — Song Seon-mi as Kim’s main screen partner once again — acts in some ways as a more stable Hongian mirror, a slow reckoning with a break-up that helps inform much of Young-hwan’s mindset through much of the film; it’s certainly significant that the film opens with him seeing Ah-reum outside, a moment of contemplation that sets the stage for the film to come. The two real interactions the two protagonists have, with the second putting into full bloom the sheepish inspiration he had received from the sight of these two women, almost act as interludes in the otherwise very causal film: Ah-reum and Yeon-joo take the first of many naps, then the next shot is of them walking in the snow; the shot of Kyung-soo and Byung-soo leaving the restaurant holds for a while before Young-hwan reenters to read his poem.

I had also forgotten that the poem featured those cutaways to a visual representation of his words, with a purposefully out-of-focus Shin Seok-ho working at an old gas station. Indeed, this is maybe the first Hong that uses what might properly be called montages; under the first two scenes when Young-hwan is talking to his sons, there are a few shots that appear to be flashbacks to various times during the past few weeks of his stay, including some priceless ones where he plays with dogs and giddily chops a piece of wood with an axe. These moments are downright conventional, but in Hong’s hands and especially with his particular dialogue, perched between conversational and poetic, it plays considerably differently, even if it actively breaks away from the “realism” otherwise present.

Hotel by the River remains incredibly difficult to talk about, if largely because its strengths seem specific to it and less tightly rooted in Hong’s body of work as a whole. Of course, there’s no shortage of linkages: the priceless line from Yeon-joo that Byung-soo is “hardly a real auteur” (given the heavy focus on his father and brother’s artistry, the lack of mention of Kyung-soo’s profession is noteworthy), the additional link between the two parties of Yeon-joo’s wrecked car mysteriously ending up in the brothers’ hands; the purposeful elision of how Ah-reum’s hand was burned; the frequent talk about autographs/celebrity and the digressive nature of the brothers’ initial conversation about the river. And the mere sight of seeing Yoo Joon-sang and Kwon Hae-hyo playing brothers is a delight, especially since their last shared screentime was as middle school friends; Yoo’s longer hair weirdly makes him look a lot different, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he switched to a vape in real life, necessitating his character to smoke the same. I’m also very fond of the scene where Kyung-soo and Byung-soo are given stuffed animals and the latter has to force himself to smile; it also leads into the handily philosophical sequence explaining the meaning of their names (in Chinese characters!), which is punctured by the typically Hongian response from Kyung-soo that his name has much less meaning than his brother’s.

It is in that balance that Hong finds his work and Hotel by the River, that need to learn how to be human while also belonging to heaven (echoing Ah-reum’s belief in The Day After); it’s not simply a film about letting go, but also about balancing that with the observation of those around the central doomed person. It was probably inevitable sooner or later that Hong would have a character definitely die on-screen, though of course there have been characters who died in dream sequences or who vanished from the film, but I think the finality of that scene is both effective, especially in the long shot of the door as Kyung-soo and Byung-soo’s voices come from off screen, and made more mysterious by that dissolve to Ah-reum and Yeon-ju crying in bed together. The link between these disparate strands is made both more apparent and more opaque in this moment, a final complication that prevents this from simply being an open-and-shut Hong unlike his other work, even in the late period. Even though my heart doesn’t tremble for this one as much as the films surrounding it, it trembles nevertheless, precious and delicate in its own way.

English Title: Grass
Korean Title: 풀잎들/Pul-ip-deul/Blades of Grass
Premiere Date: February 16, 2018
U.S. Release Year: 2019
Festival: Berlin (Forum)
Film Number: 22
First Viewing Number: 20
First Viewing Date: April 24, 2019
Viewing Number: 2
Ranking (at beginning of run): 4
Ranking (at end of run):
Film Number (including shorts): 25
First Viewing Number (including shorts): 23
Ranking (at beginning of run, including shorts): 4
Ranking (at end of run, including shorts):

Running Time: 66 minutes (25th longest)
Color/Black & White: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shooting Format: HD Video
Structure: Linear day, moderate repetition
Recurring Actors: Gi Ju-bong (eighth appearance), Seo Young-hwa (seventh appearance), Kim Min-hee (fifth appearance), Ahn Jae-hong (fourth appearance), Han Jai (fourth appearance), Kang Ta-eu (fourth appearance), Gong Min-jeong (third appearance), Jung Jin-young (second appearance), Kim Sae-byuk (second appearance), Kim Myeong-su (second appearance), Lee Yoo-young (second appearance), Shin Seok-ho (first appearance)
Season: Autumn
Weather: Sunny
Alcohol: Soju
Non-Alcoholic Drinks: Coffee (iced), water
Food: Tuna, fish soup, grilled meat
Drinking Scenes: 2
Creative People: Theater actors, screenwriters, TV actor
Academia: Professors
Vacation: N/A
Dream Sequences: N/A
Film Screening: N/A
Films Within Films: N/A?
Q&A: N/A
Naps: N/A
Family: Sister-brother
Vehicle Scenes: N/A
Crying Scenes: 3
Number of Shots: 26
Number of Zooms: 18 out, 25 in
Music Style: Impromptus Opp.90 (Schubert), Lohengrin (Wagner), Tannhäuser Overture (Wagner)
Title Background: White paper, printed/Black background for closing credits (three figures and ball in Jeonwonsa logo), Orpheus in the Underworld (Offenbach), Canon (Pachelbel), muted synth strings, Oh! Susanna recorder and xylophone and harmonica version, Korean singer with guitar
Voiceover: 1 (reading text)

Potentially Hong’s most Rivettian and overlooked film, Grass would seem to embody what would be minor in any other director’s universe. Running just 66 minutes, it premiered in the Berlinale Forum, the sidebar organized by Arsenal typically reserved for boundary-pushing work even though On the Beach at Night Alone won a prize in competition the previous year, and generally was ignored by most non-Hong acolytes, who generally tended towards its successor. But ever since I first saw it, Grass has consistently felt among Hong’s most fascinating and moving works; it is certainly true that a minor Hong is major, but its magnificent complexity seems to openly defy such simple categorizations.

For one, Grass splits open the question of the Hong lead even more openly than The Day He Arrives did. The logical idea is to label this a Kim Min-hee film: she’s explicitly put front and center as the observer; she has voiceover narration of what might be her descriptions of the events in front of her, what might be her script and/or diary, what might even all be her imagination. The film in many ways feels like it’s building up to her final decision to actively engage with those she’s been eavesdropping on; her name is even Ah-reum, her heroine’s name in The Day After. But her narrative is only really centered in a few scenes: her interaction with Kyung-soo — Jung Jin-young, Wan-soo from Claire’s Camera, in a pivotal role here — and the extended scenes with her brother Jin-ho (Shin Seok-ho, the future lead of Introduction in his first Hong film).

Instead, Ah-reum functions almost akin to Anton Walbrook’s master of ceremonies in La Ronde, whose presence links and shapes the viewer’s understanding of the narratives that we see beyond simply their shared space. Probably Hong’s most stripped down feature yet, using only 26 shots in the whole film (one more than the number of zoom-ins alone), the structure initially seems to be clear: two people have a conversation in the café — the man sits on the right and has an iced coffee, the woman sits on the left and has a hot coffee — that involves a mention of suicide and a tense relationship, which first happens between Hong-soo (Ahn Jae-hong, in probably his biggest Hong role) and Mi-na — Gong Min-jeong, the eyepatch wearer in Yourself and Yours and Sang-won’s companion in On the Beach at Night Alone — then Chang-soo (Gi Ju-bong, finally sporting a beard) and Sung-hwa (Seo Young-hwa). But that gets interrupted immediately after, shifting first outside for a more light-hearted conversation between Kyung-soo and Ji-young (Kim Sae-byuk, Chang-sook in The Day After), then Kyung-soo directly interacting with Ah-reum, then the trio of scenes that leave the café and decamp for a restaurant.

This is one of the crucial paradoxes of Grass: on the one hand, it could be perceived as one of Hong’s simplest narratives, a single day moving from day to night. But on the other, its structure warps, constantly changing the viewer’s preconceptions of what it’s supposed to be, and making the passage of time as hazy as The Day He Arrives. It is almost like a Hong film that was composed of his past characters but stripped of the context to their conversations, leaving only these spaces of play and chance that shift with each line of dialogue in much the same way as Rivette’s narratives operated. It’s easy to glean pretty early on how much it invokes death and uses it as a recurring theme, but character relationships become and stay fairly uncertain past that point: Hong-soo and Mi-na declare their love for each other (and the latter’s Europe trip is just for show) after having a rancorous discussion early on, Kyung-soo and Ji-young have either an intense friendship or an affair, the relationship of Sung-hwa is much quieter and less evident than the actors and writer she’s surrounded by (the way she looks on during Kyung-soo and Chang-soo’s discussion is amazing).

Even, and especially, Ah-reum is not immune to this. If I was being excessively contrarian, I’d call this Kim’s best performance, if only because it so radically diverges from the nigh-angelic image in Hong’s other films. It initially begins like that, with her quietly sitting in the corner and her hushed voiceover calmly assessing the difficulties present in the two conversations. But once she leaves to eat with her brother and his girlfriend Yeon-ju (Han Jai, another recurring background Hong face), her entire demeanor seems to shift. It’s certainly true that Kyung-soo’s proposal to use her as inspiration doesn’t come across nearly as well as he was probably thinking — it’s left deliberately unclear whether he’s actually attempting to ask her out, though in general he plays a nicer version of the depressive Wan-soo — but Ah-reum generally has the same sort of reticence she had in The Day After in this first section.

Aside from the opening scene of Tale of Cinema, I don’t think Hong has ever really focused on siblings, but it’s truly remarkable seeing how much Kim changes her style to accommodate the bossy older sister role, mercilessly mocking her younger brother’s naiveté and disdaining love as creating burdens for others. After a brief détente created by Yeon-ju replying that all men are cowards (except Jin-ho), Ah-reum first gets in an argument with her brother, walks towards then away from someone singing with a guitar, then returns to the café. Her voiceover then takes on a wholly different tone, first scorning the repaired relationship between Hong-soo and Mi-na, then mournfully wondering if she can have some of the smuggled soju, if she’ll ever have the same kind of connection that Kyung-soo and Ji-young have — “People are emotions. Emotions are gullible and forceful, precious, cheap, and alluring.”

That Ah-reum does get to finally have that sip of soju fits in well with Hong’s renewed focus on finding common ground between his major characters in this late period, but it also heightens the murkiness between observation and imagination, documenting and narrativizing. It’s entirely unclear whether the first two conversations really were as complicated and fruitless as Ah-reum perceived and/or wrote them; while participants of both conversations are seen in the same frame as Kyung-soo, there’s no real interaction between them until after she assumes her “real”/”unreal” persona, and of course the fact that all of them stay at the café for what seems like eight hours is its own air of unreality. Maybe the shot of Jin-ho and Yeon-ju walking together, one of the few scenes that doesn’t involve Ah-reum in any way, helps shed light: it’s in a kinder register, the brother ruefully noting his family’s difficult side (amusingly attributing the dispute to “spinster’s hysteria”) before the couple decide to get a drink. The bookend of them renting hanboks and taking each other’s pictures as first Hong-soo, then Kyung-soo look on — the significance of Ah-reum taking Kyung-soo’s place at the table as he’s left outside, like he was at the beginning of the film, is definitely worth noting, as are the three stills of the empty café and alley after the final scene — effectively assuming their place within the narrative near the café that they had been excluded from before, is one of Hong’s great unexpected delights.

The other two scenes in Grass that pass by without Ah-reum’s direct comment are two of Hong’s most mysterious and emotional, in vastly different tenors, and which both take place in the restaurant. The first is perhaps Hong’s most unusually shot table scene since he stopped cutting within scenes: the camera is of Jae-myung’s back — played by Kim Myung-su, who was the stepfather in the first half of Tale of Cinema — on the left and Soon-young — Lee Yoo-young, Min-jeong from Yourself and Yours — on the right. Even as the conversation becomes more and more tense, with the suicide of the former’s close friend and the latter’s lover/possible student brought up more and more, the vantage point, aside from a zoom-in, never shifts, leaving almost all of the scene to play out on Soon-young’s stricken face — Lee looks a lot different than in Yourself and Yours, with bangs and darker hair that, coupled with the black-and-white, make her emotions much more stark than her endlessly mutable past character.

If that wasn’t enough, the heavy use of beautiful classical music in the café, which almost drowns out the conversation and suggests a much different undercurrent of emotion from the mundane conversations, is supplanted here by, of all things, what sounds like a recorder, xylophone, and harmonica cover of the minstrel song “Oh! Susanna.” I don’t know what possibly possessed Hong to do this, but it’s an unexpectedly sour but fitting joke to overlay this scene. And of course, there is that startling pan left to the shadow cast by Jae-myung, which simultaneously seems to stand in for both the presence of every single Hongian man blaming the problems of himself and his friends on women, and for all the dead people who have left behind these lonely souls. It is a totally spectral image, recasting everything around it.

If that scene, which even leaves Ah-reum and Jin-ho in uncomfortable silence, is one of Hong’s bleakest, the very next one is one of his most effervescent. As Ji-young waits for her appointment that seemingly never comes to pass, she goes downstairs to see if the person is outside, then walks upstairs to see if her phone has gone off, then repeats this exercise a few more times. Then, she takes her eyes off of these things, simply delighting in the pleasure of the activity, going faster and faster as her smile grows and grows. This arc, embodying emotions through motion and performance, in many ways acts as a synecdoche for every single character’s journey through this film, where practically everyone comes to terms with their circumstances and finds joy within it, even in the face of the death of one’s self or one’s loved one. That it is assigned to the character with the least amount of problems (she even has a new boyfriend) only speaks to the ease with which Hong works, trusting a seemingly minor character to suddenly embody everyone’s worries and their means of lessening it.

The Korean title of Grass translates to Blades of Grass, recalling Walt Whitman, and while the potted plants outside didn’t factor in as much as I remembered, they still have something of a calming force: people don’t speak while they look at the leaves, instead simply smoking and contemplating, whether accompanied by Ah-reum’s voiceover or not. But nobody stays in this means of stasis for very long; they are met by a friend — the friendship between the four fellow drinkers isn’t revealed until Ji-young approaches Chang-soo — or are pulled back inside, ready once again to face the uncertainty of relationships and be reconciled. Though the owner is often described, he is never seen on screen; I like to think that it’s Hong, watching over his beloved actors and spaces in much the same way as his partner does in the film, revealed with a simple pan and zoom.