The startlingly prolific Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has, apparently with the ease of simply taking another breath, produced another of his lo-fi urban-pastoral comedies; these are small-scale films of Rohmeresque lightness whose regularity and resemblance to each other is such they could almost be regarded as the constituent episodes of a giant, ongoing conceptual saga about city life for Korea’s educated middle classes.
As ever, there are extended, real-time dialogue scenes, mostly shot from a single camera position – occasionally enlivened with a slight zoom or pan – which often take place in cafes or restaurants in which the characters are drinking heavily; sometimes they have outbursts, although their emotional equilibrium is restored by the end of the scene. Hong’s partner Kim Min-hee plays Jeonim, a junior professor at a women’s liberal arts college, sometimes to be seen reading or sketching by the River Han. Although she works in textiles (there is a brief, and borderline-preposterous scene in which she is seated at her loom), Jeonim has to supervise a kind of extra-curricular theatre project in which seven young women students are supposed to be performing a five-minute microdrama or sketch. (The whole movie is like a semi-improv sketch, in its way.)
