With the usual opening credits overlaid on a yellow screen, the latest Hong Sang-soo film commences in the only way it could, the golden hue bright and warm in its familiarity. That’s the realm in which the Korean auteur’s features often play in: recognisable and relatable, not just in their resemblance to each other, but in the simple scenarios shown. Of course, more always bubbles beneath the surface.
In Hill of Freedom (Ja-yu-eui eon-deok), straightforwardness marks the plot but not the presentation, as Japanese visitor Mori (Ryô Kase, Judge!) returns to Seoul to reunite with the language school co-worker, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa, The Gifted Hands), he wishes he made a life with two years earlier. She isn’t home, so he leaves a note on her door, stays at a guesthouse run by the polite Juok (Yoon Yeo-jeong, Boomerang Family) and also inhabited by her overly interested nephew Sangwon (Kim Eui-sung, The Winter Pianist), and frequents a coffee shop owned by the friendly Youngsun (Moon So-ri, The Spy: Undercover Operation), as he waits for her arrival.
Mori’s exploits, solely revolving around interacting with his new friends their only common tongue of English, are wittily recounted via letters he writes to pass the days. Hill of Freedom opens with Kwon collecting the correspondence, then shuffling through his scattered stories. There’s a gimmick at play in the way the tale unfolds, but in such an unassuming, talk-driven effort focused on the complexities of characters and conversation, it works. Filling in the gaps in the chatter and the action – between eating and drinking, as is the filmmaker’s style – is a curious puzzle audiences will revel in watching fall into place. That Mori reads a book about the illusion of time throughout the feature is telling.
Hong’s layered films often make a mystery out of ordinary moments and average people, all caught up in everyday confusion. Whether fascinated with a charming foreigner who influences those she interacts with (In Another Country), a wannabe actress at a juncture between her family and her future (Nobody’s Daughter Haewon), or a woman circled by three friends who each think they understand her (Our Sunhi), as is the case in his most recent preceding output, there’s comfort and joy to be found in his exploration of the easily identifiable but never easy vagaries of personality, passion, life and love, and in his thoughtful conveying of such contemplations with recurrent light-hearted sensibilities.
In the writer/director’s sixteenth feature from a resume that also includes Hahaha, Oki’s Movie and The Day He Arrives, and possibly his funniest and sunniest, his usual modus operandi is evident; however here is the rare filmmaker who doesn’t suffer for returning to his preferred territory again and again. The same visual clarity is evident, the flat aesthetic quality perhaps lessening in each outing, just as the same awkwardness emanates. Also resurfacing is his winning way of wrestling earnest performances out of his engaging cast, whether playing intoxicated or restless, as well as his keen eye for capturing the heart of human connections, needy, thwarted and everything in between, and as shaded in hope as they are in darkness.
Exceeding the bounds of its brief 66-minute running time, Hill of Freedom swiftly becomes the definition of short and sweet, but with the substance often not accorded with such a description. Zooming in on the minutiae of relationships both literally through the director’s trademark fondness for the technique, and in a narrative that jumps from incident to incident, via modest means the end result is as revelatory as it is resonant courtesy in its amusing observation and on-point insights.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Hill of Freedom (Ja-yu-eui eon-deok)
Director: Hong Sang-soo
South Korea, 2014, 66 mins
Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival
http://brisbaneasiapacificfilmfestival.com/
29 November – 14 December
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