Summary
Only Hong Sang-soo could make a deliberately out of focus film and still keep us glued to these characters talking about snacks for an hour.
It isn’t a film festival unless you’re seeing at least one Hong Sang-soo joint. A perennial favourite, the prolific filmmaker’s familiar motifs might feel a bit samey to the uninitiated. His characters regularly walk around the city, smoke, talk, drink soju, and more often than not wind up near a beach.
Hong certainly doesn’t change that formula for IN WATER (물안에서). It follows young actor/director Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho) and his two actor friends (Ha Seong-guk and Kim Seung-yun) on Jeju Island while making a film. They talk, split a pizza and drink, scout locations for shooting, and eventually film a few scenes. In other words, familiar Hong territory.
The difference here is where the director chooses to focus. Quite literally: Hong’s camera is often deliberately out of focus for many of the scenes. The effect is palpable. First and foremost, it switches off of the part of the film-watching brain that is always looking for details, ensuring that the dialogue rises to the fore. There’s a scene where the trio are looking intensely at a wall that the audience can’t properly see. All we can do in the surrounding scenes is listen to chat about motivations, lost savings, and past relationships.
So, what’s even more interesting are the scenes that Hong has chosen to keep in sharper focus. More often than not, these are ones where Seoung-mo is just hanging around outside their rental house, discussing the shopping, or simply looking at the sea. It’s almost as if to imply that these are the snapshots that stand out in memory.
Whether you choose to read this as the fog of memory or, as Hong will say in most interviews, an unintentional decision on the day, it remains one of his more interesting pieces in recent years for this point of difference.
Hong Sang-soo produces so many films that even by the time this made it from its Berlin debut in February to the Sydney Film Festival in June, a second 2023 feature (In Our Day) opened at Cannes. Difficult to keep up with, and harder to define, Hong’s small corner of cinephilia may continue to appeal to a very specific audience, but that’s probably why we keep coming back.
2023 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Hong Sang-soo | WRITER: Hong Sang-soo | CAST: Shin Seok-ho, Ha Seong-guk, Kim Seung-yun | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2023 | RUNNING TIME: 61 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 7-18 June 2023 (SFF 2023)
