What Does that nature say to you by Hong San-Soo

A film by Hong Sang-soo

With: Ha Seong-guk, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee, Kang So-yi, Park Mi-so

A young poet drops his girlfriend off at her parents’ house and is amazed by its size. He bumps into her father, meets her mother and sister, and they all end up spending a long day together; fueled by conversation, food and libations.

Our rate: ***

The Korean director continues his work of undermining, continually questioning his own cinema, looking for new little things, variations on what he’s already offered. Here, he takes familiar characters (he often works with the same actors), and once again invites them to a table, where, with the help of Suju (he’s back to Suju), the people will gradually reveal themselves, shed their masks and come to the truths they were trying to hide, But he’s experimenting with themes that aren’t necessarily so frequent in his cinema, and in terms of form, he chooses, probably to offer something of a mirror image of the background, to deliberately rely on blurred or even out-of-focus images, when they’re not over-saturated, with a sound design that is also deliberately amateurish. For its main character, a young lover who is about to be introduced to his in-laws, has a passion for poetry – just as Hong San Soo has always had and still has a passion for cinema, but his poetry may seem very rudimentary, and he leaves it to the viewer to judge, asking two questions in the process: what is poetry, and what is cinema? Beyond this formal aspect and this subject, which we like to think of as a joke on the part of the filmmaker towards critics and festival organizers, who never cease to apply qualifiers and discourses to works, sometimes totally invented or over-interpreted, Hong San Soo, in a very fluid and well-constructed way, uses several successive tableaux – let’s say they take place at an hour’s interval each – to go round certain subjects, and to show the differences in conception that each of his characters may have. In much the same way as Radu Jude does in Contental 25, he manages to share with us his observations on the human race, in terms of the relationship with money, the relationship with the father, the relationship or even the interference of parents in their daughter’s love affairs, the hidden motivations behind a relationship, the relationship with art, with poetry, in the absolute, but also as a philosophy of life, whether it’s justified by free time, or an opposition to a non-poetic, work-driven way of life, and so, finally, the whole film raises the question of a person’s self-image, of appearances, a subject we’ve seen addressed in other films in competition, Clever and well-crafted, pleasant and wise.