‘Introduction’ Review: A Narrow but Deceptively Deep Cut of Hong Sangsoo Simplicity

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Like cracking a window in a stuffy room, it sometimes feels as if Hong Sangsoo’s films are where festival lineups go when they need to breathe. The 2021 Berlin Film Festival takes a quick, de…

,” an airy 66-minute sampler of everything the Korean director’s fans admire, which is coincidentally everything his detractors dislike. But despite the familiarly strange, gossamer-spiderweb pattern of glancing encounters and dropped connections, “Introduction” is not as featherweight as it might first appear. And contrary to its title, it’s an expansion pack rather than an entry-level starter kit for the Hong Cinematic Universe.

Its already brief runtime is snapped in two, with the halves separated by a couple of years. Both parts are, loosely speaking, centered on a cross-generational introduction. First, Juwon , a student who has come to Berlin to study fashion, meets an artist who is an old friend of her mother’s , and who will put Juwon up until she finds her own place.

It’s the manner of Hong’s presentation that makes his films so scintillating, or so infuriating if you’re on the other side of the Great Hong Divide . Interactions are full of pauses and awkwardnesses, some of them realistic, some of them heightened to almost theatrical effect. Hong’s is the cinema of the oblique pattern, the imperfect echo, the repetition that changes meaning slightly with each new recitation.

 

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