In Front of Your Face

He has a cinephile fan­base stretch­ing from Seoul to Paris to New York, but Hong Sang-soo remains large­ly ter­ra incog­ni­ta to UK cin­ema­go­ers, since only two of his 28 fea­tures have ever been offi­cial­ly dis­trib­uted in cin­e­mas. Pre­sum­ably, he just doesn’t tick the box­es for genre mar­ketabil­i­ty, effects spec­ta­cle or upfront social satire. Instead, the Korean’s pro­lif­ic out­pour­ing of cel­lu­loid minia­tures pos­si­bly seem too casu­al and com­pact to make an impact. Hong, though, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly packs these booze-sod­den con­ver­sa­tion pieces with myr­i­ad lay­ers of emo­tion­al obser­va­tion, philo­soph­i­cal mus­ing and meta-tex­tu­al significance.

That’s cer­tain­ly true of In Front of Your Face, which coin­ci­den­tal­ly proves a very fine place to start your Hong jour­ney. It’s his first time work­ing with Lee Hye-yeong, an actor who’d made her name in 1980s Kore­an cin­e­ma but retreat­ed to TV for the past decade, and who’s absolute­ly stel­lar here as a returnee from expat life in the US, back home to recon­nect with her sis­ter and maybe her roots. There’s a high cheek-boned poise to Lee’s screen pres­ence which sug­gests she’s not going to be easy to know, yet we’re intrigued by occa­sion­al voiceover high­light­ing her deter­mi­na­tion to take strength from the every­day grace of each moment.

We sense she’s a some­what trou­bled soul, and rev­e­la­tions do indeed fol­low over a drunk­en long lunch with. Split the difference.a preda­to­ry film direc­tor admir­er. This extend­ed set-piece is sim­ply remark­able, not least for the sheer act­ing chops Lee dis­plays when, after sundry bot­tles of Chi­nese liquor, she grabs a near­by acoustic gui­tar to dis­tract the would-be Lothario by pick­ing through a half-remem­bered folk tune.

We’re absolute­ly root­ing for her to escape unscathed, yet the scene’s big reveal sug­gests that her die may already be cast, while also point­ing up the key themes Hong has thread­ed into this seem­ing­ly flung-togeth­er series of encoun­ters. Lee’s response to life’s aching evanes­cence is to savour the joy in each moment, as opposed to the self-involved direc­tor (bril­liant­ly creepy Hong reg­u­lar Kwon Hae-hyo) fight­ing against time itself, eager to pre­serve his youth­ful infat­u­a­tion with her in the form of a new film collaboration.

Some folks may yet be won­der­ing how the crit­i­cal hype around Hong can be jus­ti­fied by some­thing which still seems so tiny – a hand­ful of char­ac­ters, a lot of dia­logue, cam­era style restrained to the point of near-invis­i­bil­i­ty. Yet his admir­ers tru­ly appre­ci­ate the Tardis effect of his films, which open out huge­ly from their seem­ing­ly con­fined scale. This is anoth­er sub­tle jew­el, wise and charm­ing, insou­ciant yet mea­sured, and some­how squar­ing the cir­cle between the over­whelm­ing sad­ness of lost time and the glint of eter­ni­ty in a pass­ing instant.