Hong Sang-soo’s highly nuanced, low-key film could be a criticism of Korean sexual politics, or just a series of different meetings
The cinema of Korean director Hong Sang-soo is seductively low-key and lo-fi, and his latest is a movie-novella in three encounters. It’s so downbeat, so matter-of-fact, that the registers and nuances are almost beneath the radar of what generally constitutes filmic effect. This really is just people talking, and though they sometimes raise their voices, get angry, embarrassed, or upset, a keynote of polite calm soon reasserts itself. Hong’s camera sedately records each exchange from an undramatic distance, sometimes zooming in for something closer midway through the conversation, but not for any pointed reason. Watching this film means recalibrating your expectations so you can gauge the subtleties and absorb the sotto voce implications about relationships and sexual politics. Pretty much all the way through, nothing very sensational seems to be happening. And yet the movie’s sensational meaning is hiding in plain sight: in the title.
Gam-hee is a young woman in Seoul who is a florist by trade, though no great importance is attached to that. She is played by Kim Min-hee, the director’s partner and longtime collaborator, who has acted in seven of his last eight films – but is probably best-known for starring in Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden, based on Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith. Gam-hee has been married for five years, during which time, we learn, she has never been apart from her husband for even a single day. She is at some pains to tell people that she has been fine with this. She says things like: “We manage to have good moments every day”; and “I feel a little love every day and that’s enough.” But now her husband has gone off on a business trip so she is going around visiting some old friends, which evidently hadn’t been possible before.