It’s never difficult to trace a thread between the movies of Hong Sang-soo, which have for years come in twos, delicately perambulating the same thematic grounds (immensely fertile, it turns out), but the twinningly titled In Water and In Our Day (both 2023) evince an especially close kinship. One film encapsulates the dawning of a young man's artistic vocation, while the other poignantly parses an older man’s winding-down career.
At the outset of In Water, Seung-mo (Shin Seok-ho), an actor who wants to direct, has asked his former classmates—an actress (Kim Seung-yun) and a cameraperson (Ha Seong-guk)—to help make his first short film on Jeju Island. While the three reacquaint themselves with one another, the potentially prickly undertones of insecure male egos threaten to ignite a love triangle, a Hongian specialty. The filmmaker curtails such a subplot this time around, focusing instead on Seung-mo’s artistic struggles. Without a script, the cast and crew have nothing else to do but lie in wait, an exercise in trust for them as much as for us, while we anticipate something to materialize from all the sitting around—and it does. In Water culminates gracefully into a testament to creative incipience, as Seungmo experiences a flaneuring-induced epiphany just before shooting, which he becomes the basis of his first work.
In The Novelist’s Film (2022), Hong took interest in how the rhythms of daily life find resonance within a creative mind. Here he more explicitly articulates the struggle to unlock expressive powers, capturing the practicalities of the process. As the film reaches backward in time, toward youth, Hong seems energized by new formal techniques. Filming intentionally out of focus in smeared beiges and blues, he alludes, perhaps, to his own deteriorating eyesight but also to some peaceably fuzzy salad-day recollection. Hindsight isn’t 20/20; Hong places us squarely in the young character’s befogged and gently musing present.
If meaning tumbles into place all at once at the final scenes of In Water, it gradually accumulates through the gestures and structural sleights of In Our Day. That film’s bifurcated narrative comprises two distinct tales, each set within the confines of an apartment, entwined and progressively reinforced, like a braided rope. In one strand, Sangwon (Kim Min-hee), an actress who has elected to end her career pursuits, finds temporary refuge with her friend Jungsoo and Our, Jungsoo’s cat—the privileged beneficiary of the film’s sole zoom. In the other, an aging poet, surname Hong (Ki Joo-bong), engages with a student who wants to make a documentary about his life. As the film ping-pongs between both accounts, patterns and repetitions emerge: feline absences, gifted guitars, thespian-hopefuls querying for advice. Sangwong’s passionately intoned exhortations to a young actor take the form of an unburdening—the emphatic, slightly performative kind, indispensable to Hong’s films (often instigated by soju, though not here), that instructs a young person on the ways of the world. These mirror subsequent scenes in which the septuagenarian writer meets his interrogator’s broadly philosophical questions—What of truth? What of love? Why write poetry if no one reads it?—with words of cheeky wisdom and self-protective defiance. The ex-actor and the aging poet share a rejection of societal expectations and a commitment to maintaining their individuality. They are also tied together by peripheral remembrances and small habits, almost as if the older had rubbed off on the younger. The particulars of their relationship history are wistfully evoked but never disclosed.
Hong is a filmmaker who consistently ropes his own personal histories, circumstances, and surroundings into his work, and these films are redolent with retrospection, a marker of the director's maturation. In Water features a younger cohort in their late twenties or early thirties, a generation Hong only started to explore four films ago in Introduction (2021). The characters’ youthfulness is ironically emphasized by their meal selections (sandwiches and milk, pizza and cola), and their faint sense of melancholy feels reminiscent of Hong’s gloom-stained earlier works. If In Water feels slight, its weight is substantially amplified when viewed in conjunction with In Our Day. Across both films, characters search for fulfillment, plumbing the depths of creative devotion. “You only live once,” Seungmo says, asking why life has to be so hard. The poet concurs: It ends quickly, but you only need think about what you will fill the interval with. In Water’s final images provide an answer, an appreciation of life’s small treasures: a solitudinous drag on a cigarette; the glow of a blissfully round moon. In the poet’s words, “don’t look for meaning . . . just jump in the water.”
In Water screens this evening and tomorrow, October 1 and 2, and In Our Day screens October 11–13 at the New York Film Festival, the North American premiere of both films.
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