Hong Sang-soo’s films have trained us to look for structural tricks, so when we see Sangok (Lee Hye-yeong) writing at the beginning of the film or waking up near the end of it, we’re led to read the film as a dream or a letter or a screenplay. But the truth is much simpler and more painful. The Woman Who Ran (2020) found depth and complexity within a very simple narrative — three conversations between women — but In Front of Your Face (2022) finds power in simplicity itself; in directness. The first hour is mostly incidental. After years of living abroad, Sangok wanders around meeting family and visiting places from her youth. This is reframed by a fairly conventional twist: she has secretly come back because she only has a few months to live. It doesn’t change what we’ve seen in the way Hong’s more formal twists do, the moments aren’t so much transformed by their new context but deepened. Since every little lunch date might be the last time she gets to spend with this person, each one is imbued with a whole new weight.
As Hong’s view of people has become gentler – he’s quite far from the literal violence of his earliest films or the bleak cruelty of Woman is the Future of Man (2003) – so have his patented zooms. They move subtly, almost invisibly, instead of harshly breaking into the space, he is looking for the same grace that Sangok is. Throughout the film, we hear her pray to see it in everything before her. But she speaks from a watcher’s distance as if looking at life through a camera. She rests her hand next to her sister Jeongok (Yunhee Cho) as she sleeps, but can’t quite bring herself to hold it. When Jeongok wakes up, she almost taunts Sangok with that distance, talking about how strange her dream was, how it suggested such good fortune that she ought to buy a lottery ticket, but insisting that you’re not supposed to tell anyone your dream before midday. Unsurprisingly, she never gets around to it. Like so many characters in Hong’s older films, Jeongok can’t see outside of herself, and outside of the petty squabbles that her solipsism brings. But even if Sangok can, it’s not so easy to see grace before you when the world is so full of bristling life pushing against it.
If there’s not much temptation for Sangok to look into the blackness of her future, there is plenty to slip into the sadness of her past. She finds herself back at her childhood home, reflecting with the new owner about how much bigger the garden used to look. It’s contrasted, in the film’s only cut within a scene, with an ugly concrete wall she’s sitting in front of. Maybe they’re alike, the now-overgrown garden has been sullied by time. Hong is now working as his own cinematographer and the images have never looked rawer. Especially with flowers, which are usually shown as soft and natural but whose pinks and greens now pierce garishly through the frame. Maybe when you’re leaving this world, those are what become the sharpest; the things you know you’ll miss.
Looking straight ahead, at what’s in front of your face, as harsh as it can be, can bring a little grace sometimes. When Sangok is sitting in the sadness of her old house — now half-rebuilt, filled with stepladders and blocked-off windows — she hears the distant voice of a child as if her heavy memories are starting to bleed through. But then, a child walks in, Sangok asks her name and it’s different. When they hug, Sangok might be imagining she’s holding her younger self, but she’s also smiling. There is comfort in knowing that as painful as the past feels, it has gone.
Problems come when you’re not simply content to look at beauty, but want to try to capture it. After admiring some flowers, Jeongok suggests that she and Sangok take a selfie with them. This seems so absurd because there is a deep conflict between photography — and therefore filmmaking — which finds beauty through curation and framing, and nature, which finds beauty in and of itself. Jeongok can’t find the right angle, her arm is too short apparently. Hong has tried to bridge this gap with the form of his films — unbroken takes, unfussy cinematography, and incidental conversations — he doesn’t cut to only the most dramatic parts of life, he lets things develop naturally in front of us, rather than in the artificial arrangement of edits. The increasingly fast and streamlined way Hong makes his films — scripting the morning of filming and now also shooting them himself — allows him the space for moments to occur in and of themselves; when Jeongok sees a bee, the camera can pan over and see that it’s really there.
But Hong sees his limits with the character closest to his analogue, the fidgety, awkward, and presumptuous director, Jaewon (Hae-hyo Kwon), who meets with Sangok to discuss her acting again for the first time in years. When he mentions the scene that made him fall in love with her, he focuses on her yellow-green dress, like the yellow-green nature, and their tastes seem to be really aligned. It seems like it might work out, after she tells him that she’s dying, Jaewon throws out his plan to write a feature around her, to be filmed a few months from now, and decides to start making a short the very next day. But the next morning he calls her to cancel their plans. Even through a camera, he’s scared to really look her — and the world — in the face; she has to comfort him after telling him her secret. “I’ve never felt that myself,” he says of her philosophy of finding grace in what’s in front of her face, “but I’m curious.” The camera is his way to stay distantly curious.
When Sangok gets that phone call, she can only laugh, whether out of a kind of acceptance, a dark amusement at his callousness, or out of deep desperation. But still, she doesn’t give up on the world, on people. That morning she touches her sister’s hand and asks what she’s dreaming about, even if, after she wakes up, she probably still won’t say. In perhaps the best scene of Hong’s career so far, Sangok plays the guitar for Jaewon in a way that’s clumsy and almost unbearably moving. It could only be so because we heard her tune it first.
All of Hong’s films have taught us how to read their unique language, and if the garish colours of the flowers start to look beautiful, it’s because he’s shown us that beauty doesn’t come from perfection, from perfect control, but from something as messy and conflicted as life is.
“Heaven is in front of our face,” Sangok says, we just have to look for it, and Hong shows us how. But when Sangok starts to play for a second time, Jaewon walks away, it just doesn’t have the same magic. The moment has passed. As with life itself, nothing beautiful can really last. But we can at least be blessed to know that it was there.
