Coincidences abound, exactly of the sort that might turn up in a film by the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo: his new film, “Hill of Freedom,” is playing (Sept. 30 and Oct. 8) in the New York Film Festival, which also features a complete retrospective of the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. When I wrote about the prolific Hong’s film “HaHaHa” (still awaiting U.S. distribution), I called attention to the similarities between his work and Mankiewicz’s films. Mankiewicz, of course, is a classic-Hollywood luminary, best known for his scintillating comic melodramas “All About Eve” and “A Letter to Three Wives,” whose directorial career ran from 1945 (“Dragonwyck”) to 1972 (“Sleuth”). He worked with high budgets (including the very highest—for the sumptuous, notorious, and glorious 1963 spectacle “Cleopatra”) and filmed many of the greatest stars of the era, whereas Hong works with scant budgets, filming rapidly on location, mainly with local actors.
Yet “Hill of Freedom” only reinforces the unlikely connection: like Mankiewicz’s films, it’s ingeniously constructed. I don’t hesitate to apply the M-word—masterwork—to this new film, and it’s especially important to catch it at the New York Film Festival, because, unfortunately, many of Hong’s films don’t come out in theatrical release in the U.S., or if they do they run only briefly and scantly. (For instance, last year’s festival included “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon,” a similarly clever and exquisite film, which hasn’t been released here yet.)
It has become something of a commonplace to liken Hong’s films—with their emphasis on intimate relationships unfolding by means of extended dialogue scenes, and on serendipitous encounters in clearly delineated real locations—to those of Eric Rohmer, and all the more so because of the explicit French connections with which Hong has marked his work. The first film of his that I saw, “Woman Is the Future of Man” (his fifth), released here in 2006, gets its title from a poem by Louis Aragon. His 2006 film, “Woman on the Beach,” borrows a title from a film by Jean Renoir; he made his next film, “Night and Day,” in Paris; and in 2012 Isabelle Huppert went to South Korea to star in “In Another Country.”
Well, in a crucial way, “Hill of Freedom” is Hong’s most French film yet. It is his version of a film by Alain Resnais—his gloss on Resnais’s first two features, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad.” (Coincidence comes into play again: the late Resnais’s extraordinary last film, “Life of Riley,” is playing at the New York Film Festival along with a new restoration of “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” and French Institute Alliance Française begins a month-long series of films by Resnais next Tuesday.) “Hill of Freedom” is, like most of Hong’s films, a romance; it’s also sixty-six minutes long, and so complex in its construction that I’ve watched it three times forwards and one time backwards and I feel as if I’m just beginning to get the hang of it. It also features yet another international star, the Japanese actor Ryo Kase (he’s in Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima,” Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love,” and Gus Van Sant’s “Restless”), and this in itself is a hint of the quietly vast ambition and subtle breadth of vision at the heart of the film.
Kwon (Seo Younghwa), a Korean woman, turns up at a reception desk and picks up a packet of letters; as she leaves the building, she drops them, they scatter, and when she gathers them they’re out of sequence. As she reads the letters, Hong shows the events that they depict—which, as a result, are also out of chronological order. The story that they tell involves Kwon and Mori (Kase), a Japanese man who had been living in Seoul and teaching at a language school, which is where they met. Here’s where the complications come in: the two subsequently lost contact, and Mori’s letters to Kwon tell her about events that occurred during a trip he took to Seoul in order to find her again. In the course of that trip, Kwon was befriended by another woman, Youngsun (Moon Sori), a waitress at a café called Hill of Freedom that he and Kwon frequented. Meanwhile, Mori narrates a peculiar batch of incidents—involving such characters as the woman who runs the guest house where he’s staying, that woman’s heavily indebted nephew, a young woman in the room next door, and an American man who runs another local café with his Korean wife—that both illuminate the romantic story and build it onto a lightly sketched yet expansive backdrop of emotion and contemplation.
To tell more of the story would be to reveal too much. What can be said is that the first question “Hill of Freedom” poses is: How many time frames does it intertwine? There’s the time when Mori and Kwon originally met; the time when Mori went to Seoul to find her again; the so-called present tense, of Kwon receiving and reading the letters, which brings the past onto the screen as flashbacks. But the connections and overlaps, the slips and gaps, between these times, as revealed in the course of the action, are central to the story, and that’s where the dazzling complexity and mercurial surprises come in. In a way, the subject of the film would seem to be time—a theme that Hong introduces comically, by way of a book that Mori is reading.
But that very explicitness is a hint from Hong that the movie isn’t really about time as such, but about things that happen over time. Romance and its vagaries are among them, but the subject that underlies the entire story, one that encompasses not just the love affair but history itself, is international relations. Just as “Hiroshima Mon Amour” tells the story of a love affair between a French woman and a Japanese man, “Hill of Freedom” depicts the relations of a Japanese man and two Korean women (as well as a host of other Korean people and, for that matter, an American). Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and, during the Second World War, conscripted hundreds of thousands of Koreans into forced labor and compelled tens of thousands of Korean women to serve as “comfort women,” sex slaves to the Japanese army.
Yet there’s no trace of lingering resentment in Mori’s presence on the part of Koreans. Mori himself offers no hint of historical guilt—or, for that matter, of conscience. Personal relations are marked by frank discussions of countries of origin, of national traits, and, yet, of easy connections and mutual admiration. On the other hand, these discussions take place in English, the lingua franca that connects Mori and the Koreans he meets. In effect, the entire movie takes place under the sign of American influence, even though it rigorously excludes even the slightest hint of American pop culture. Hong’s prime cinematic culture may be French—and his stylistic signature, of extremely long takes of characters sitting and talking, owes nothing to Hollywood ways—but his historical perspective is that of American dominion, which comes off as the very essence of cross-cultural connections and sea-spanning romances.
Hong is also a political filmmaker in the most abstract but decisive sense: he sees the inescapably political aspect of personal relations, and ascribes the stuff of intimate life to unquestioned and overarching forces of history. He’s obsessed with relations between men and women, and he looks at those relations as fundamentally political. In “Night and Day,” he uses the Paris setting to highlight the peculiarities of Korean traditions and habits; in “Woman Is the Future of Man,” a character’s stint in the United States brings out contrasts with Korean ways; “Our Sunhi” pivots on a planned fellowship for study in the U.S.; in “Woman on the Beach,” he seeks the sociopolitical roots of Korean men’s sexual psychology. Hong’s deft artistry is an attempt to get past the habits of issue-oriented, advocacy-besotted political cinema to work out just what a political cinema would be. And his answer is: first of all, it’s cinema. In this regard, he connects with Mankiewicz, Resnais, and other great filmmakers for whom politics is an important, interwoven part of life—and of art.
