Review: Introduction Takes Hong Sang-soo’s Narrative Minimalism to the Brink

It would be easy but shortsighted to dismiss Introduction as another collection of sketches by the prolific Hong Sang-soo. Like Yosujirô Ozu, Hong obsessively circles familiar themes embedded in plots pertaining to characters who talk at length about seemingly very little as psychic wounds gradually crystallize. But Hong’s films are easier to underestimate than Ozu’s, as they’re so piercingly minute in scale, sometimes seemingly to the point of nonexistence, though if one cares to look below their deceptively placid surfaces, the personal reverberations are often extraordinary. Each one uncovers new emotional contours as Hong continues to mercilessly hone his aesthetic, and Introduction is no exception.

With Introduction, Hong pushes his signature brand of narrative minimalism to a breaking point, even by his lofty standards. Divided into three parts, the film is literally about introductions, and Hong takes a nearly obstinate amount of time revealing his endgame, especially for a feature that only runs 66 minutes. In the first part, a doctor (Kim Young-ho) sits at his office desk, his face anguished. Admirers of Hong’s other films may assume that the doctor is the protagonist, and that he’s perhaps enraptured with a woman played by Hong muse Kim Min-hee. Instead, Hong follows the doctor as he goes about his day treating patients. A young man, Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho), arrives in the waiting room, though the doctor is distracted by the arrival of a friend, a famous theater actor (Ki Joo-Bong).

Gradually, we learn that Young-ho is the doctor’s son, a reveal that retroactively informs seemingly trivial events with a casual agony that’s characteristic of Hong’s work. We thought we were watching a story of older men reconnecting, which we were, but it’s a reunion that’s revealed to be haunted by a father’s estrangement from his son. The vignette isn’t without catharsis, but it’s symbolic and surrogated: A nurse (Ye Ji-won), who clearly has ties to Young-ho and his father, gives him the affection that his father denied him. The second part pivots on a similar misdirection, following a young woman, Ju-won (Park Mi-so), as her mother (Seo Young-hwa) introduces her to a painter (Kim) in Berlin who can hook her up with an apartment while she studies fashion. As the characters prattle on about seemingly minor things—their ages, the apartment’s view, the difficulty of breaking into the fashion industry—Hong gracefully establishes their insecurities and surrounding social frissons. Much is made in this film of the formal Korean language reserved for elders, which suggests here a bridge separating the uncertain young adults from their successful yet quietly miserable parents.

In this second part, it’s revealed that Young-ho is Ju-won’s girlfriend, and in this role he’s destined to once again be sidelined. Young-ho is at the center of Introduction’s structural perversity: He’s the protagonist of the film, yet he’s often forgotten by others, his absence gradually becoming an ironic and poignant presence in its own right. Here, Hong dispenses with one of the significant pleasures of many of his films: vicarious identification with a male artist with several lovers and all the time in the world to drink, who may be tortured but who lives a life of notable luxury. Such figures are in Introduction (the doctor, the actor), but they’re seen through the scrim of Young-ho’s pain. They’re un-sentimentalized, their selfishness and aloofness (as well as their own pain) compassionately excavated for all to see.

Even in the film’s third part, the one that most directly engages with Young-ho’s feelings of rejection, he’s effectively marginalized—pushed to the side of the screen, along with his close friend (Ha Seong-guk), while the aforementioned theater actor and Young-ho’s mother (Cho Yun-hee) lecture him over his indecisiveness about his own acting ambitions. The older man and woman are getting loaded on soku over a long lunch, and the former launches into a diatribe about acting and human passion that ranks among the most moving moments in Hong’s cinema. The actor is merciless with Young-ho, pompously yet earnestly castigating the younger man for his timidity and daring him to take the mantles of his own life and assume the center of the stage he’s been haunting over the course of this very film.

Introduction was shot by Hong in the same kind of ghostly black-and-white as many of his other recent productions, and it finds him continuing to refine a sense of negative space that communicates gracefulness and inner turmoil. When characters stand or walk alone here, looking into a pocket of bright white sunshine or stepping into a reflective rain puddle, they momentarily slip into their own skin after intricate, implicitly combative verbal jousting with family and friends. Here, Hong continues to compress the distance between himself and his actors, capturing moments of unforgettable behavioral acuity, which he fuses with his stark, expressionistic, nearly Bergman-esque compositions. The result is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges and resonant dead ends and false starts.