CIFF Notes: In Front of Your Face (Saturday Oct 23 - 6pm)

There's a Q&A response by the South Korean director and screenwriter Hong Sang-soo that has stuck with me for a few months now, and while I don't exactly recall the question (someone vaguely prompting a discussion of masculinity and spirituality in his films) I recall his entirely raw emotional response: "I always wanted to be free and I’m not. To be free I have experimented with many methods, and one of the methods I use is to look at things as they are, or try to." 

He was then asked if he had any advice for young filmmakers, to which he responded: "No...I don't."

I didn't read Director Hong's response in this interview as glib exactly, but as someone trying to inspire in his own roundabout way. Hong's methods are highly specific and personal, involving a repetition of settings, actions, and visual ideas that are sometimes comforting in their tropes, and other times evolving new ideas within those same repeated techniques. The films are singular in their scope and approach, their love and trust of actors, their ability to capture the kind of humanity and interpersonal expressiveness that eludes a multitude of filmmakers who spend far more time and money and never capture anything nearly as intimate or complex. Director Hong's reticence to offer advice to young filmmakers may come from offhandedness or exhaustion (he does produce at a relentless pace), but perhaps this sentiment comes from a place that understands a filmmaker's work, in order "to be free," needs to come from a personal place and develop it's own techniques outside of any advice he might be able to give.  

As I watched Hong's new film In Front of Your Face, it was evident how finely tuned his methods have become, how light his touch, and how much trust he inspires in his actors. The film easily sits close to the top of my favorite Hong films, including Night and Day, Right Now Wrong Then, and Hill of Freedom, and features a remarkable central performance by Lee Hye-young as Sangok, a former actor who is keeping her impending illness a secret, and a tremendous supporting performance by Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo (On the Beach at Night Alone, In Another Country), playing a somewhat self-reflexive role that recurs frequently in Hong's films, a film director. And, as tends to transpire in Hong's films, the two characters become acquainted over dinner and quite a few drinks--but the lengthy, single-take sequence between Lee and Kwon that occupies most of the final third of In Front of Your Face is possibly my favorite sequence in any Hong film I've seen (around 10 of his 30 or so films). I admit to being increasingly addicted to his work in the last few years, and while they're famously an acquired taste, once acquired the films create a progressively deep and personal character as a body of work that feels at once very minimal, yet full of potential for discovery. In Front of Your Face is about a woman facing mortality, and in this sense feels weightier than some of his earlier work, though Hong has no interest in being mired in false dramatic devices or thematic concerns, even when it comes to the narrative trope of a character who "doesn't have long to live," as with Sangok. In Hong's films, people must drink and make passes at each other and make fools of themselves and share in the pregnant silence of waiting for a cab or smoking a cigarette. The drunken cafe scene that transpires toward the end of In Front of Your Face where Sangok speaks to her admirer about the difficult task of actually seeing that which is "in front of your face" realistically is one of Hong's most beautiful scenes, hilarious and heart-breaking all at once, not worried at all about the dramatic crescendo or punchline, but holding us in that sustained sweet spot, that liminal emotional space, which he manages to do more than once throughout the film by simply aligning our knowledge with Sangok's, and keeping everyone else on the outside.

In terms of the actor-director relationship on display in Hong's work, there seems to me something important to be focused on in his technique, especially from a western perspective. Hong has said that he commonly gives actors very little to go on, not telling them details about character or how the plot unfolds on the day of shooting. In Front of Your Face is an excellent film to think about this unique actor-director relationship through, since the supporting characters not knowing of the central condition of the main character plays out with an extraordinary naturalism and profundity. But, also, Hong's technique shines a harsh light on the whole idea of psychological realism (this is the kind of "actor's handbook" approach I've taught in acting classes to college students for many years, by the way, and am continually trying to get students to confront and deconstruct) and an approach to acting that asks the performer to "show their work" by drafting and employing a sort of Criminal Minds-style behavioral profile. Hong's actors are asked to do exactly the opposite--don't come in with anything other than an openness to what might happen in the scene at hand (and maybe a couple of outfits). It's this technique that strikes me as putting the lie to an often vague devotion that so many actors have to the western "method," and effortlessly conjures the emotional depth of a film like In Front of Your Face.