By the Stream review – bur­rows under your skin

There’s an anx­i­ety-induc­ing, tick­ling time­bomb aspect to watch­ing Hong Sang-soo’s won­der­ful new film, By the Stream. He makes you wait and see who’s going to be the one to final­ly break down, freak out or embrace a latent vio­lent streak and inflict their ire on the oth­er char­ac­ters. Ahh here we go, here comes the Hong trade­mark scene where every­one sits down and gets squiffy on beer and Soju chasers then starts to speak their mind. The imbib­ing of alco­hol always nudges Hong’s char­ac­ters clos­er to enter­tain­ing social faux pas, and to abrupt­ly shat­ter the polite, con­ge­nial dynam­ic that has been cul­ti­vat­ed heretofore. 

Will it be the soft­ly-spo­ken uni­ver­si­ty art instruc­tor Jeon­im (Kim Min-hee) who’s start­ing to feel the ear­ly pangs of mid-life malaise? Or maybe it’s her estranged, semi-famous direc­tor uncle Chu Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo) who seems strange­ly insis­tent when it comes to help­ing Jeon­im direct a per­for­mance piece with some of her (female) stu­dents after the pre­vi­ous (male) direc­tor was eject­ed in dis­grace? Or will the enthu­si­as­tic Pro­fes­sor Jeong (Cho Yun hee) be the one to lose it, as she sub­tly fawns over Chu Sieon?

There are a few scenes of con­flict and unease, main­ly relat­ed to the depart­ed stu­dent direc­tor who returns to the cam­pus to make his case. Jeon­im dis­plays her force­ful diplo­mat­ic skills when urg­ing him to leave and nev­er come back. And lat­er, when a drunk­en Chu Sieon holds court at a din­ner with his cohort of female per­form­ers, there’s a fris­son of coiled melan­choly in his attempts to hold their inter­est. Though this does even­tu­al­ly cul­mi­nate in a beau­ti­ful moment of earnest confession.

Yet, in the main, this is the breezi­est, most overt­ly con­ge­nial Hong film for a very long time. At its core, it is a cel­e­bra­tion of the cre­ative process, and more specif­i­cal­ly, of artists fol­low­ing their impuls­es when it comes to idea gen­er­a­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion. There are aspects of Jacques Riv­ette in scenes of rehearsal and refine­ment, and these moments are coloured by an uncom­mon sense of joy and implic­it trust. And it’s a film about mak­ing art that feels good in the moment, as the act itself can be as reward­ing – and pos­si­bly even more so – than the deliv­ery of that art to an audience.

The film rolls along in Hong’s typ­i­cal long, sta­t­ic takes that are enlivened by a sud­den zoom or jolt of the lens. The per­form­ers intone the dia­logue with extend­ed paus­es between new sen­tences and their reac­tions to oth­ers. It’s a mode that empha­sis­es an awk­ward nat­u­ral­ism that height­ens the implic­it dra­ma in even the most mun­dane of con­ver­sa­tions. Through his years of patient refine­ment, Hong has imbued utter­ly incon­se­quen­tial ver­bal exchanges with a musi­cal qual­i­ty, where – like jazz – the silence is as impor­tant as the noise.