‘The Novelist’s Film’ Review: Hong Sang-soo Finds Poetry in Familiar Rhythms

Hong Sang-soo’s The Novelist’s Film begins with Jun-hee (Lee Hye-young), an acclaimed writer, arriving at a bookstore. Inside, the air is filled with the sounds of an off-screen, seemingly one-way argument. The moment almost pointedly belies the fact that this is perhaps the least conflict-driven work in a filmography marked by less-than-explosive confrontations between characters. Indeed, Jun-hee consistently walks toward the edge of friction throughout the film, only to almost instantly double back.

Jun-hee has come to visit the old colleague (Seo Young-hwa) who now runs the bookstore. Their chatter is defined by a gentle ebb and flow of tension, with Jun-hee rebuking the other woman for her weight and not keeping in touch. Later, a chance encounter between Jun-hee and a film director friend, Park Hyo-jin (Kwon Hae-hyo), prompts her to confront him for never adapting one of her books, but after a few minutes of passive-aggressive chiding about him demurring over the project’s dim commercial prospects, she drops the matter.

The Novelist’s Film isn’t one of Hong’s usual dramedies about the ways men and women perceive themselves and wind each other up, often during drunken squabbles over soju. Here his focus is on how Jun-hee, nearing 70, still struggles to fulfill her restless creative spirit, and he beautifully keys the film’s digressive rhythm to the frustration of her writer’s block.

The reunion with Hyo-jin spurs Jun-hee to consider filmmaking as an expression of her creative drive, something that’s obliquely set up in an early scene of her having coffee with the bookstore owner and the woman’s young employee, Hyun-woo (Park Mi-so), who mentions that she has a second job in speech therapy and knows sign language. Intrigued, Jun-hee asks Hyun-woo to translate a sentence from one of her books into signs, and the older woman’s attentiveness and delight as she works out the meaning and interpretation of each individual gesture hints at an interest in seeing her prose communicated visually.

That desire is amplified when Jun-hee bumps into a renowned actress, Kil-soo (Kim Min-hee), in a city park. The pair quickly bonds after exchanging pleasantries, and when Kil-soo introduces the author to her husband’s nephew, aspiring filmmaker Gyeong-woo (Ha Seong-guk), Jun-hee pitches them a short film that she would write and at least partially direct. With no set idea for a story, only a loose collection of images and character interactions dancing in her mind, the author gradually comes up with a notion for a relatively sedate, gently observational film that sounds, on paper, suspiciously like a Hong Sang-soo movie.

The Novelist’s Film is filled with winking jabs at Hong’s fixations, suggesting a grand joke at his own expense, namely how his dialogue-driven, visually modest work is often called “literary.” Yet the film takes a broader, more wondrous look at how an accomplished artist in one medium might attempt to tackle another with no grounding in its rules and standards.

Hong also visually experiments with layers in his art. The filmmaker blows out the contrast of the film’s black-and-white cinematography so that the sky in certain moments is rendered as an expanse of white negative space; one low-angle shot of a small set of stone steps in a park evokes a stairway to heaven itself. He also shakes up his typically centered blocking, as in other moments in the park where he places characters at the edges of frames to emphasize the jagged, almost expressionistic shapes of the winter-stripped trees behind them.

Hong continues to add wrinkles to his usual themes and visual hallmarks right to the end, which is given over entirely to the film that Jun-hee makes. It’s an unmannered, almost naïve work that has no discernible narrative direction or novelistic structure. Instead, the author delights in the power of images to speak, an expression that brings her earlier fascination with sign language full circle. Her exploration of a new form trades prose for poetry, communicating ideas in ways that are alien to her own career and, metatextually, Hong’s.

Earlier in the film, Jun-hee admits that her writer’s block derives at least partially from feeling “like I have to keep inflating small things into something meaningful.” The Novelist’s Film suggests that Hong has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details, and perhaps that his strongest work is yet to come.