‘In Front of Your Face’ Review: The Difference Is in the Details in Hong Sangsoo’s Latest

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Hong Sangsoo characters have a habit of — you might even say a genius for — diffidence in the face of profundity. In that way, they’re very like the films in which they appear: outwardly casu…

characters have a habit of — you might even say a genius for — diffidence in the face of profundity. In that way, they’re very like the films in which they appear: outwardly casual, slight, polite, holding pain and truth and existential observation in check with an airy gesture, a sad smile or, in “In Front of Your Face,” the South Korean auteur’s second film this year , an unexpected peal of utterly genuine, soul-repairing laughter.

Certainly, Sangok laughs at the strangest moments. A merry, musical gurgle bursts from her after she drunkenly shares her most painful secret — one she has not even confessed to her sister — with a relative stranger, whose sobbing response is much more appropriate.

Sangok is a well-known ’90s actor who is now living in the States but has returned to Seoul for a visit. She’s staying with her sister Jeongok — whom she discovers she does not know terribly well — and has a loose plan to meet up with a celebrated Korean director . During her stay, she breakfasts with Jeongok, sneaks a cigarette under a bridge, stains her blouse at a noodle shop and visits the house where she used to live, which is now a boutique.

With Hong wearing all available hats — as he has been doing increasingly — as writer, director, editor, composer and cinematographer , we know it’s not by accident that even the shooting style is keyed to a slightly different register. Many of Hong’s recent films have been monochrome, or of such a deliberately blanched palette that they might as well have been.

At one point, Sangok and the director are caught in a downpour and share a cigarette. She wears a trench coat. They juggle an umbrella. The alley is narrow, and at the far end a turquoise shutter frames them. It is an assemblage of Hong elements viewed from a moving point, and for a second, it fleetingly coalesces into an achingly romantic Wong Kar Wai composition.

 

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