Film Reviews

What comes to mind when you think of a Hong Sang Soo film? By the Stream (2024)—Hong's second feature film this year and the thirty-second in his filmography—ticks all the boxes: an ensemble of artists and art students, complicated sexual and romantic relationships, daily consumption of soju, and sudden bursts of emotions following drunkenness. Of course, the main characters are played by Hong’s regular troupe (Kim Min Hee, Kwon Hae Hyo, etc.). However, Hong does not merely repeat the answers he offered in his previous films. Instead, this film feels like a refined manifesto, refined from The Novelist's Film (2022) and In Water (2023).

The film begins with Si Eon, a once-famous actor and director, visiting his niece, Jeon Im, a textile artist and university lecturer. Si Eon is tasked with directing a 10-minute sketch starring Jeon Im’s students for the university’s theatre festival because the original student director had to drop out after dating three of the actresses. Si Eon also meets Prof. Jeong, an influential figure in the department and a long-time admirer of him, who is close to Jeon Im. Much of the film centres on Si Eon and Jeon Im dealing with the theatre festival or on scenes of Si Eon, Jeon Im, and Prof. Jeong eating nice food and drinking soju.

During the course of the film, the artists face various struggles outside their art. Si Eon is on hiatus due to a scandal that is never fully explained; the student director loses his job due to his complicated romantic entanglements; and Si Eon’s play is lambasted by the audience, leading to Prof. Jeong and Jeon Im being summoned by the university president over its political undertones (it is implied that the play was interpreted as anti-feminist by a predominantly female audience at the women’s university). These events echo Hong’s real-life scandal and incidents portrayed in his earlier films. Although Hong continues to make films in Korea, he is virtually a persona non grata (like Si Eon) to much of the Korean public, known for holding celebrities to exacting moral standards. The student director is reminiscent of other libidinous directors heavily featured in Hong’s oeuvre (e.g. Jung Rae in Woman on the Beach (2006), Seong Jun in The Day He Arrives (2011), and so many others). This may be a stretch, but the criticism of the play hints at the anti-Hong sentiment in Korea, led by female audiences who abhor his affair.

However, this film departs from Hong’s earlier works, where the protagonist often undergoes such incidents, sometimes instigating them. Peculiarly, each day in the film begins with a long shot of Jeon Im and ends when she leaves the scene. She is a composed figure, always one step removed from the turmoil, or even actively withdrawing from them to return to her studio and work. As a result, we do not witness certain spicy events, such as the student director abruptly proposing marriage to one of his romantic interests, Si Eon confronting the student director one-on-one, or Si Eon and Prof. Jeong having sex. Each of these scenes would have constituted a pivotal incident in Hong's previous films. By centring the film on Jeon Im instead of Si Eon and thereby omitting such scenes, Hong seems to present a new outlook on life he has embraced.

This shift is epitomised by Jeon Im’s approach to art in this hostile world. For her, art has become her vocation in its literal meaning, following a mysterious revelation. This gives her the courage to proceed without doubt despite any obstacles she encounters. Yet, she is not an artist who escapes into an imaginary world; her works are grounded in real-world objects, and the use of textiles as her medium adds tangibility to her art. She keenly observes flowing water, much as she observes the fleeting dramas of the world, in contrast to the older artist Si Eon, who seeks solace in Prof. Jeong as a form of escape.

The improvised poetry scene fits awkwardly into this context. Si Eon asks the student actors to compose poems about the person they want to be. Perhaps realistically, the unprepared students deliver underwhelming and somewhat hackneyed verses. To make matters worse, the students all burst into tears, again, realistic given that they are drunk, but one that jars with Jeon Im’s calm presence. Overall, this segment feels like a remnant of Hong’s signature emotional drinking scenes executed less impressively.

Nevertheless, By the Stream successfully showcases the new direction of Hong Sang Soo to an audience that still associates him only with drunk and horny artists. Hong’s core understanding of the world remains unchanged: when Jeon Im reaches the source of the flowing water at the end, she declares that there is nothing. As in other films of his, the world is not governed by universal truths but shaped by the actualisations of coincidences. Jeon Im chooses to happily embrace that fact. I eagerly await Hong’s answer to what lies ahead.

“Things happen. Things happen here and there.” This was a quote from Slavoj Žižek that my friend repeated when he was going through a breakup. While I was watching Perfect Days (2023), a new film from Wim Wenders, I kept thinking about this quote. I searched for the source and found a YouTube video with a very fitting title Slavoj Žižek explains the entire world in three seconds. Because it is a three-second video, I have no idea what the context of this quote was and what Žižek intended to say there. Yet, I want to believe that this quote is for all the people who want to cry sometimes, and we see them a lot in this film.

In Perfect Days (2023), things indeed happen here and there. The film follows the life of an old toilet cleaner in Tokyo, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho). The first few days in the film resemble typical “Get Ready With Me” or “A Day in the Life” videos. He goes through his morning routines and meticulously cleans toilets to the point that this mundane and unpleasant task appears sacred. The seemingly identical days repeat until the weekend arrives, upon which he has a different set of routines. Until that point, the film is indistinguishable from many comforting films built upon a particular fantasy of quiet Japanese life. Hirayama’s taciturnness somewhat reinforces this stereotype.

However, more events start to unfold. Wenders guides us through the snippets of other lives that Hirayama observes. We see Hirayama’s young colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who has a financial problem, and his girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada). Hirayama’s niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) ran away from her wealthy but overbearing mother (Yumi Asō), Hirayama’s estranged sister. We also see Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa), the owner of a bar that Hirayama frequents, and her ex-husband (Tomokazu Miura), who has little time left to live. There are more brief encounters with characters such as the homeless guy (Min Tanaka) practising some sort of non-standard Tai Chi moves and a boy who waits for Takashi. A common theme: they all contain a deep, individual sorrow.

Sad people have always occupied a central place in Wim Wenders films. Paris, Texas (1984) revolves around a family tragedy; in Wings of Desire (1987), even angels embrace the human emotions of yearning and wistfulness. Perfect Days attempts to go even further. The disheartened characters expose their sadness without really explaining its origin. Some of them we can guess (e.g. Mama’s ex-husband or the toilet boy), but the rest (Hirayama and his sister, the homeless person) are veiled to the audience. This choice of concealment better captures the truth—that there is always an element within our emotions that is inexplicable to others. Hirayama does not try to enquire about or provide solutions to others’ feelings. These characters come in, interact with Hirayama, and exit the story. Hirayama’s days are marginally modified—e.g. he sleeps downstairs for his niece and drives Aya to her workplace—only to be reunited with his “perfect day” routine when his niece returns to her home and Aya never reappears in the film.

The ending of this film, where nothing is resolved, can be perplexing to the audience who anticipated some sense of closure. I would like to borrow Paul Schrader’s theory of transcendental style to interpret the choice Wenders made. Wenders pointed out Ozu Yasujiro as one of the major references for Perfect Days, and Ozu is also one of three main transcendental stylists that Schrader identified in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972/2018). Schrader writes of the Transcendentalist style as “human acts or artefacts which express something of the Transcendent”, “beyond normal sense experience” which is accomplished through “a general representative form”—this form takes place through unassuming, bare camerawork; simplistic, naturalistic acting; and editing that is uncomplicated. To Schrader, Ozu’s transcendental style aims to express the “Wholly Other” that transcends human emotions into a larger form. In addition, he breaks down Ozu’s film into three stages: the everyday, disparity, and stasis. The everyday, which does not need much explanation, can be found in the everyday routines that Hirayama follows. We can also argue that the disparity, described as “an inexplicable outpouring of human feeling” in Schrader’s book, is expressed through intermittent emotive moments in Perfect Days. The first two stages exist to culminate in the last stage: stasis. The definition of the stasis in Schrader’s book is “a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it”, which I believe neatly captures the last scene of Perfect Days.

Returning to Žižek’s quote, we might wonder what we can do when terrible things happen to us. The film suggests that the acceptance might be a solution. A recurrent theme throughout the film is “komorebi”, a Japanese word for a fleeting pattern that leaves, sunlight, and the wind make. Every day, Hirayama takes a picture of komorebi. Each pattern is unique: some of them are good and some of them not so. Nevertheless, knowing that all of them originate from the same sunlight might help us to not be too consumed by the individual patterns.

Quantum Shorts Film Festival is the biannual short science film contest, organised by the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. You can stream shortlisted entries since 2012 in their archive. Almost all the submissions are independent low-budget films, where sometimes the whole crew are non-professionals. Many of them are conceptually intriguing, although they may not be technically outstanding.

Unlike Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum physics puts time in a special position. The definite direction of time, however, does not exist even in quantum physics, unless you deny the unitary evolution of the universe. In other words, if you are given two videos played in forward direction and backward direction, you cannot choose the one with the right direction, in principle. Yet, the order of events, or the reasonable arrangement of events, exists and can be justified by the fact that some progressions of events are much more probable than the ones in the opposite direction. The director, Kevin Lucero Less, demonstrates exactly this feature in the film Boundary of Time (2022). It is a short three-minute film displaying the ink dispersing through the warm water. The process is very similar to cloud tank shots, a non-CGI special effect that was popular among earlier films to emulate the flow of the atmosphere. However, the reversibility of time is not a uniquely quantum feature; on the contrary, the example of the ink dispersion is more macroscopic and classical than microscopic and quantum. I do not see the logic behind including this film on a Quantum Shorts shortlist, but then again, everything can be explained by quantum physics, right? The bigger problem is, ironically, that this mechanical evolution betrays the very premise of the film: the arrow of time. Due to the time-reversal symmetry of the universe, even if the film is played in reverse, there is no guarantee that the direction of time is truly inverted; they might have just captured the most improbable event imaginable. In other words, for sceptics like me, this visual demonstration is a perfect example of the impossibility of establishing a definite direction of time.

A more convincing argument for the arrow of time, or a more profound caveat of the time-reversibility, is revealed in Leonardo Martinelli’s If the World Spinned Backwards (2018). The narrator recites the script, as if it were poetry, speculating about a world where time flows from the future to the past. This time, it is not just about ink becoming more concentrated or the sun rising from the west. The film delves into the intricacies of perception and memory. In the narrator’s, and thus the film’s, naïve imagination, memory does not accumulate but decumulates; people perceive the flow of time, albeit in the opposite direction. However, would this be the case?

Henri Bergson posited the concept of duration to combat the mechanical worldview that physics (including quantum mechanics) entails. According to him, duration is dynamic, “imbued with an intrinsic directional flow-character”. Hence, our experience is not a collection of slices of an instantaneous moment; instead, it is inherently a continuous and indivisible process. In Bergson’s words, “By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, [memory] frees us from the movement of the flow of things.” So, what would happen if we cannot have this usual function of memory capturing the flow of time? Would we be bound to merely witness the individual snapshots and not be able to experience them as an indivisible whole? Unfortunately, the film does not really explore this direction, at least not in its script.

The use of music in Martinelli’s film, however, is interesting in this context. The entire background music sounded as if they were played in reverse. Unlike visual imagery played backwards, where we can still discern what is happening and appreciate what is presented aesthetically without much difficulty, the music loses all its beauty when its temporal order is disrupted. Perhaps, in a world spinning backwards, that would be the experience we would have: random signals coming into (or going out of?) our brain.

Both films fail to deliver more intriguing visuals to support their arguments. Using spreading ink as a visual metaphor for an irreversible process is somewhat of a cliché and, as a result, not very surprising, although the shots in Boundary of Time do have certain aesthetic appeal. If the World Spinned Backwards merely stitched together rather arbitrary pieces of images played backwards. In some of these clips, I am not even sure if the filmmakers shot themselves or used stock videos, as each shot appears rather disjoint, and its style is also inhomogeneous. Films, fundamentally, take snapshots of actual events, and editing is the art of arranging them in different ways. These two films have chosen the most obvious way of depicting the flow of time, namely arranging the snapshots in forward or backward order. Hopefully, in future editions of Quantum Shorts, we may encounter more creative editing techniques that explore the relationship between the flow of time and the medium of film.

Summer Hours (2008) starts with a family gathering at Hélène’s house, celebrating her 75th birthday. Three generations—Hélène, her three children (Frédéric, Adrienne, and Jérémie) and their spouses, and Hélène’s grandchildren—spend good family time. The house is full of artworks, some of which even Musée d'Orsay (a museum in Paris, France) wants. These are indeed typical Assayas protagonists: (upper) middle class, and cultured. The plot is rather simple, even mundane compared to other more eventful films. Hélène (Édith Scob) passes away at some point, and her children decide what to do with her collection and her house. Since Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) do not live in France anymore and keeping the house is not worth the trouble to them, they want to dispose of Hélène’s items. Frédéric (Charles Berling), who still lives in France, wants to keep them, but he does not have enough resources to buy his siblings out. They decide to donate some of the collections (to avoid heavy tax), sell the others, and also sell the house where they spent their childhood. A family secret is revealed along the way, but this also passes as a minor drama.

The central theme throughout the film is how culture and possessions, even the very valuable ones like Art Nouveau furniture pieces, become obsolete, or at least antiquated, as time passes. Although it is a natural process of human civilisation, once you sympathise with those who are attached to the past, witnessing this change is heartbreaking. Summer Hours is greatly successful at this point. The one main character, or at least the one with the most screen time, is Frédéric, the eldest child of Hélène. Due to his age, lifestyle, or maybe just his personality, he is the one who is the closest and most attached to the old era. He is also one of the two most emotional characters, alongside Éloïse, a housemaid working in Hélène’s house, a person who actually belongs to the old era. The audience is driven to share the perspective of Frédéric: we understand other siblings’ circumstances but are still sad to accept that the collection, and everything connected to it, such as the house, memory, expectations we always had of our lives, and our posterities’, does not matter as much now.

Nevertheless, the film does not just lament the ungrateful younger generation or the Americanisation that is turning French culture vulgar. Even Hélène, who devoted her whole life preserving the legacy of Paul Berthier, her uncle and later revealed to be her lover, understands that this legacy means almost nothing to her grandchildren. A cybernetic sculptor, who used to be well-known during his era and who probably was at the cutting edge of the art world, is now completely forgotten, without regret. The museum thus plays a special role in this film. At least the very best of the past era can be kept somewhere with respect, albeit without the emotional attachments or meaningful interaction that Hélène might have with them. Recalling that this film was initiated as a short film celebrating Musée d’Orsay and studying the ‘life cycle of artworks’, Hélène’s death and her funeral parallel the exhibition of her collection at the Orsay.

Another point that this film executes exceptionally well is to refrain from overly dramatic bursts of emotions. The way they introduce Hélène's death is surprisingly dry. Hélène packs her stuff and fades out; it looks like an ordinary day in her life. In the next scene, Frédéric is interviewed by a radio show, worrying about his book’s reception from people. His next schedule, however, turns out to be a meeting with a guy to discuss the cemetery arrangement for his mother, who died less than a week ago. After a loved one’s death, we surely have emotional turmoil, but there are also practical matters that need to be handled rationally, e.g. cemetery arrangements and inheritance. The second half of the film portrays these not-very-glamorous aspects with nuanced acting, without explosive arguments and crying. The scene where the family finally decides to sell the collection and the house is extremely powerful, without needing Marriage Story-like shouting.

Frédéric assumes that his siblings would also want to keep the house and the collection. Jérémie explains his circumstances and the tension develops, yet everyone is still perfectly reasonable and civil. Adrienne announces that she will get married to her boyfriend, and the tension relaxes temporarily, relieving everyone for a moment. However, it means that Adrienne also does not want to keep the house and the collection. Frédéric slowly realises, and accepts the decision. This is one of the most realistic illustrations of a tough discussion for grown-ups that I have seen in film.

The film ends with one of Hélène’s grandchildren and her friend running away. They will enjoy their time, maybe produce some great artwork on the way, and eventually end up being enclosed in a coffin or a museum. It is sad, but we can accept that like grown-ups.