The South Korean director Hong Sangsoo is each one of the most prolific and one of the most authentic administrators in the world. He has made seventeen options in the previous twelve years, and he owes his fast output each to his authentic strategies and to his naturally overflowing story sense. His new movie, “Introduction,” embodies his economical observe in its spare surfaces—and it displays his profuse dramatic sensibility in the tales teeming beneath its surfaces. Working with small crews and minimal budgets permits him to work shortly, at the pace of thought. (On “Introduction,” he directed and produced, wrote the script, did the cinematography and the modifying, and even composed the music.) Unencumbered by gear and personnel, he writes his tales in the course of the shoot and sometimes permits his actors nice latitude with the materials whereas the digicam rolls. In “Introduction,” he turns his pliable ironies to a brand new and mighty theme, the bitter conflict of generations—the fury of younger love and the inevitable misunderstandings and missteps that end result from mother and father’ indifference and involvement.
Hong isn’t a minimalist however a tip-of-the-iceberg-ist, and “Introduction,” which opens Friday at Lincoln Center, is, in its strategies, one of his most excessive. It runs a mere sixty-five minutes; it has solely 9 characters, seen in small teams from two to 4, in intimate settings, the place they principally sit and discuss, besides after they stand and discuss, and discuss and discuss, telling tales of their previous and disclosing their plans, thereby bringing essential background occasions into the foreground and evoking huge dramas in pointed particulars. The motion spans two continents and a number of other years; it packs in a rare quantity of life-changing occasions for its younger protagonists. Most of these adjustments occur offscreen, as the drama onscreen registers the overwhelming pressure of these adjustments, seismographically, in the course of their day by day lives.
“Introduction” is centered on a younger couple in a South Korean metropolis: two college students whose paths are about to diverge. At the outset, Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho) is strolling along with his girlfriend, Ju-won (Park Mi-so), en path to a hectic assembly along with his estranged father (Kim Young-ho), a rich physician who has summoned the younger man to his workplace in the hope of a reconciliation. Soon thereafter, Ju-won goes to review in Berlin—her mom (Seo Young-hwa) has a longtime buddy (Kim Min-hee), an artist, who lives there alone and has invited her to maneuver in. Distraught at the separation, Young-ho decides to ask his father for the cash to review in Berlin, too. He is planning a profession as an actor, however, when he seeks to alter his plans, his mom (Cho Yun-hee) summons him to a seaside restaurant to set in movement her personal plan to maintain him on the straight and slim profession path.
The film is about in three massive sequences, every numbered onscreen, pared down, and sharply restricted in its areas, suggesting three distinct components of the shoot, every of which appears prefer it took just some days of work. To keep away from spoilers, I’ve unnoticed some of the individuals in the intertwining plots and counterplots, some of the stunning encounters that ensue, some of the leaps in time that the characters’ dialogues—and even a dream sequence—fill in. What stays a relentless is the many nuances of anguish and battle that come to the fore in apparently amiable and placid circumstances—and the intense emotion that irrationally bursts out, even in informal expressions and offhanded gestures, throughout the peculiar encounters of household, pals, and lovers.
The physician’s workplace is the place, in the effort to reconcile, the estrangement performs its phrases out once more, as Young-ho is saved ready each by his father’s skilled calls for and by the arrival of his father’s buddy, a well-known actor (Gi Ju-bong). Young-ho approaches his father—who’s sentimental but in the end detached—with an indifference to match. Hoping to exploit his father for money, Young-ho speaks derisively of him to Ju-won, telling her scathingly, “Greed for money is bottomless.” Yet his devotion to his mom is tempered by the proven fact that she doesn’t have cash; her energy and her authority are diminished in his personal craving and demanding eyes. If the temperamental actor proves to be one form of unintended position mannequin for Young-ho, the Berlin-based artist proves to be a keen and welcoming one for Ju-won, even when it’s unclear that this benevolent host is doing her any favors, as the legislation of unintended penalties imposes itself with whiplash energy.
That energy reveals the younger couple’s romance to be tenuously conditional, tethered to the metal threads of sensible circumstances and the new rounds of probability and alternative that they convey. What comes by way of, above all, is stifled rage—a long time of misunderstandings and missed connections, kids who’re desperately needy, mother and father whose finest efforts for his or her kids—or their lack of effort—lead equally to frustration, confusion, contempt, and, in the end, their kids’s primary indifference as they battle to search out their very own place in the world. In Hong’s world, it’s the artists who can provide their turmoil and their rage voice and kind—and in the course of do their half, for higher or worse, to affect the youthful technology.
This is a world of bonds so taut that they depart scars. Yet Hong movies with a restrained precision, in a way so reserved and spare that there virtually appears to be nothing to it. The film contains solely about thirty pictures, some of which run two minutes or extra, which Hong, doing his personal camerawork, parses and punctuates with crisply assertive pans and zooms. The film is shot in black-and-white (like such different language-centered new motion pictures as “C’mon C’mon,” a lot of “The French Dispatch,” and “The Tragedy of Macbeth”), but there’s little that appears informal or relaxed in its discursive tone. Hong’s methods burst shortly from the observational to the analytical; he doesn’t a lot develop or construct characters however quite a world of feelings and concepts. (A by way of line in Hong’s work is South Koreans travelling to the West for research, work, or escape, and the scrutiny of Korean mores and manners in the mild of that have, particularly concerning gender roles and romantic relationships.) His movies are full of daring and decisive motion—taken principally offscreen and solely by implication—that distills his characters into archetypes and lends their incidental connections and intimate troubles an overarching, poignant grandeur.
“Introduction” has a peculiar, distinctive place in Hong’s copious œuvre. It’s not as instantly, deeply transferring or profoundly reflective as “The Woman Who Ran.” It doesn’t have the fascinatingly overt intricacy of “Hill of Freedom” or “HaHaHa,” or the wry and reflexive cinema-centricity of “Claire’s Camera” (starring Isabelle Huppert and set at the Cannes Film Festival) or “Oki’s Movie.” But its readability and ease—and the outrageous, practically humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complicated, and turbulent tales—makes it amongst Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable movies.
