“In Front of Your Face,” Reviewed: The Great Hong Sangsoo Reaches New Heights

Even the greatest directors sometimes rely on cliché to dispense information swiftly, and it’s all the more tempting for filmmakers whose work is spare and condensed, such as the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo. In a classic-era Hollywood movie, when characters discreetly cough, it’s a sure bet that they’re dying of tuberculosis; in his new film, “In Front of Your Face,” Hong makes use of this trope in the very first scene. His protagonist, Sangok (Lee Hye-young), a middle-aged former actress who has returned to her home town of Seoul after many years away, gently clutches her stomach in pain. Spoiler alert: she is gravely ill. Sangok’s return is a terminal one, and her every visit, excursion, and encounter has the emotional and symbolic power of finality. The overwhelming mystery of life in the presence of death inspires Hong to new heights of imaginative inspiration, and reveals all the more clearly the essence of his artistry.

To match the existential stakes of the action, Hong ratchets up the dramatic pressure with a race against time, squeezing almost all of the film’s action into the span of a single morning and afternoon. Sangok’s first reunion is with her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee), from whom she has long been estranged. Sangok stays on Jeongok’s sofa, in a modern high-rise apartment, but the siblings know almost nothing of each other’s lives. Jeongok even encourages her sister, who has been living for years in the United States, to buy an apartment nearby—which is to say, she has no idea that Sangok is dying. The secret packs great tension, as Jeongok leads Sangok on a leisurely round of strolls and visits that, for the actress, virtually shriek with urgency. They visit Jeongok’s grown son, Seungwon (Shin Seok-ho), at his rice-cake shop, where she samples some of his wares. It’s a hallmark of Hong’s art that an infinitesimal detail—a small stain of sauce on Sangok’s blouse—emerges as both a plot point and a major symbol, a cinematic metaphor that develops grander implications as the drama progresses.

Sangok’s most important reunion is with the cinema itself. She has scheduled a lunch meeting with a younger movie director (and a longtime fan of hers) named Song Jaewon (Kwon Hae-hyo), who wants to direct a movie that would be her return to the screen. (Hong’s casting is poignant, too: the graceful and radiant Lee, a star in the early nineties, has done few movies in recent years.) Sangok’s trip to meet Jaewon takes her near the house where she and her sister grew up, summoning a mighty rush of memories that impose themselves with a seemingly physical power.

Sangok’s meeting with Jaewon is the center of the film, both dramatically and spiritually. In a skein of dialogues that runs more than a half hour long, set in and around an otherwise empty café, Sangok confronts and defies mortality by way of her artistic vocation and creative passion. In the time she has left, she wants to embody a final version of herself in art—but she also wants to get some enjoyment out of life. Here, Hong offers up a bitterly ironic view of the world of movies, almost an Eastwood-esque morality play in which the greatest danger that art poses to an artist is demagogy—the use of fame for personal gain, rather than in the interest of the work itself.

With “In Front of Your Face,” Hong glories in the work itself—in the power of the cinema. Within the spare intimacy of his confrontational, conversational drama, he offers several remarkable twists of cinematic form in order to access the vast inner dimensions of Sangok’s local adventures and encounters, including moments that waver ambiguously between fantasy and reality. He uses the simplest of subjective devices, internal monologue, to sharp effect. Sangok’s interior reflections are jewels of metaphysical ardor, prayers minus religion and God, and in intimate discussion with Jaewon she gives fuller voice to her spiritual quest, which is also an aesthetic one: she strives to avoid thoughts of the past and future in order to stay focussed on the present. She wants to see what’s in front of her face, as she says, because that’s where “Heaven is hiding.”

Such a need to see is at the core of Hong’s own artistic practice. The prolific director’s work since 2009 has yielded nineteen low-budget independent features, and all display a distinctive, original, and unified style that provides a taut framework for sharply expressed emotions and intricately developed ideas: long dialogue scenes done in extended takes, with few camera moves and parsed by zooms in and out. His method involves a kind of planned spontaneity, in which he composes scenes and dialogue day after day and offers them to his actors in the course of the shoot. The most radical aspect of his work, though, isn’t in these practices and figures of style. It’s in what they reveal: his understanding of the essence of talking pictures and the distinctive aesthetic power of a dialogue-rich film.

When silent films gave way to talking pictures, the art of cinema attained the prospect of neutrality, albeit a sort of armed and tense neutrality. By letting the dialogue bear much of the weight of dramatic expression, and by restraining the image to a quasi-documentary recording that’s nonetheless carefully composed, directors turned minor fluctuations of framings, glances, gestures, rhythms, settings, and moods into mighty events of thunderous emotional effect. With “In Front of Your Face,” Hong finds new dimensions for his longstanding recognitions: of the great impact of subtle variations and obsessive repetitions, of the paradox of narrative ambiguities and imaginative fantasies that arise from scenes of spare and meticulous realism, of grand symbolism emerging from banal observations. Hong, doing his own cinematography, brings tiny details—such as the food stain on Sangok’s blouse—to life with an intensified art of reserved refinement.

Many of Hong’s films are in black-and-white; even the ones that are in color are hardly memorably so. But “In Front of Your Face” makes brash and splashy use of color, from Sangok’s red nightshirt and the Lego-like palette of Jeongok’s apartment complex to, above all, the dominant swaths of bright and deep green in the foliage that seems to follow Sangok throughout, whether in public parks or private gardens or panoramic landscapes—or even indoors. In its lavish display of thriving life, the greenery seems both to reflect her fate and to ennoble her immediate experience. It turns her vision into a cosmic unity with nature. (Hong’s attention to color reaches yet another ironic extreme in the enticing, exotic turquoise of a tightly closed and view-blocking pull-down gate.) Sangok’s quest is found, above all, not in her dream of recording another performance for posterity but in the ecstasy of vision itself. Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.