After a week of beautiful cinematography, impeccable aesthetics and meaningful “visual imagery” in Film Fest Gent’s Competition, it’s a relief to sit in a movie theater and watch Hong Sang-soo’s little digital camera carefully pan over sunlit rooms while his actors discuss domestic finance. As film discourse tends to fixate itself more and more on plastic qualities—a thick coating of pretty shots and colors which is often considered, by audiences, critics and directors alike, independently from the rest of the movie, producing interesting propositions such as: “I like this movie for its visual beauty”, or: “I didn’t like this movie despite its visual beauty”—Hong, on the other hand, goes further and further in the opposite direction, getting rid of most of his crew and shamelessly filming Isabelle Huppert in A Traveler’s Needs (2024) under a light so washed the sky becomes a single block of white. It’s not arrogance that propels him on this path—as if saying “I don’t need anyone, I can do this by myself”—nor a feeling of impunity, but a continuous effort to advance towards bareness. Throughout his filmmaking career he’s been undressing his films in front of us; now they’re finally naked. And we thank him for letting us see the body and its actual workings.
If you show me a still from a movie, however stunning it may be, it’s as close to saying something about its value as a piece of flesh is to communicating the beauty of a person. It’s not a rigid sample that we need, since a movie exists in time, and is therefore movement and rhythm before colors and shapes. The surface of a body is only warm and rosy as long as there’s an undercurrent of blood flowing underneath it; so it is for cinema. Where lies the beauty of a movie? Not in the uppermost layer—the screen—nor in some imaginary essence, in a couple of abstract ideas, in some glorious detail, but in the articulation between depth and superficiality. When we praise a movie for its plastic achievements while disregarding its interior layers—its respiration—we actually commend the flesh for being cold and pale.
That’s why, finally, the visual perfection of a David Fincher film is much closer to the artificial rawness of a Fabrice du Welz than it may seem: they share the same over-reliance on effects, on the final result, while they disregard the operation itself. They’re both lost in surfaces. When we learn that Fincher, unable to realize a sequence the way he’d envisioned and story-boarded it, decided to employ his special-effects VFX team to create it entirely on the computer, we don’t know if we should laugh at his lack of awareness, rage at his audacity, or decry his hubris. Our little director-turned-God goes about creating his own world as if he was simply choosing the colors of his walls.
A movie is only as good as the resistance it shows its director. Maybe, had he faced reality instead of imposing his will on it, at all costs, he’d have understood that the shot he cared so much about wasn’t that important in the first place; maybe there was a good reason why it didn’t work, maybe, had he cared to listen to it, reality would have offered him a better option… The truth is, we’d be wrong to call Mr. Fincher an artist: he is but an engineer, designing all the pieces of his machine exactly as he needs them, so that in the end they fit perfectly together… Nothing trembles in his shots; the gears operate smoothly and in silence.
How foolish of us, though, if we were to be disappointed by David Fincher! No, we never expected that much from him in the first place. We reserve our disappointment for, say, someone the likes of Pedro Costa; not because he’s on more than one occasion praised Mr. Fincher, but because he increasingly seems to justify that praise in his own work. In Costa’s early movies, though often beautiful, we find some awkwardness in syntax; shots/counter-shots, for example, often come about with a heaviness we’d have to be very indulgent to call conscious and desired. By In Vanda’s Room (2001) he’d mostly abandoned all these tokens of filmic rhetoric in favor of his now famous long and fixed takes. In ten years he made his best work. Now, however, a new development in his method has led him to essentialize these shots that were once a solution, and turn them into a new problem; he now seems to work on them in isolation, insisting on their individual qualities as if they were supposed to express everything they could before the next one arrives. Thus, he desperately works on the photography; he sculpts light; he has the actors repeat gestures and lines till they become of a solid shape—he tries to arrive at the grandiosity of John Ford, and all he does is get closer to Fincher’s CGI. To almost completely abolish landscapes and sunlight because they don’t look quite right on digital!… He’s too worried about shaping the world and forgets to look at it; all his discoveries lie buried beneath layer upon layer of meticulous, obsessive work, his canvas thick with the paint of overcorrection.
It does an artist good to change environments once in a while. Straub-Huillet would spend months rehearsing text with the actors, yes; but then they’d move to the locations, turn on the cameras, and everything would begin anew, all of a sudden it was different work, in a different place, and they therefore were different; but if Costa sees fit to lock himself in the same room and redo the same gestures over and over again, damaging the sheet in a desperate attempt to trace the perfect line, then he’s shutting himself from the unmistakable and irreplaceable freshness of a first look, the only one capable of truly embracing reality. Our rigor is only interesting—and this Straub and Huillet knew very well—as long as it lets us see the smallest trembling with the utmost clarity. If it aims for perfection, if it aims for nothing but precision—then it’s nothing but folly.
It’s true there’s an expressionistic quality to the work of John Ford; yet we would be hard-pressed to find, even in his most extravagant movies, the same accordance between the décor and a character’s feelings as we find in Vitalina Varela (2019). Before, Costa would film Vanda shut inside because she herself was living shut inside; he’d film Straub and Huillet in darkness because they were working in darkness: it was a matter of reality. But ever since Horse Money (2014) we have the feeling the darkness is there mainly because he’s infatuated with it. In Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991), it’s under the most beautiful golden, morning light that the main character resembles death the most and seems most ready to pull the trigger. That’s life. What remains with us is not the fogginess of Ford’s The Informer (1935), but the minister’s reaction in How Green was my Valley (1941), as he sees the love of his life (played by Maureen O’Hara) marry another man, whom she doesn’t even love. He is framed in a wide shot; we never get a close-up; the sky is peacefully bright; we have nothing to hold on to but his gestures… Then a veil flies away… Compare this to the ceiling falling over Vitalina in a very intrusive close-up bathed in very dense and expressive shadows. Pedro Costa now builds caves, which, of course, do collapse eventually—but, as caves, remain mostly rigid.
We dream of a movie that would show us, at every step of the operation, how it was made, so that its real secret would be even more impenetrable; no, we dream of a movie that would be made in front of us as we watch it. Not of a perfectly realized chimera, put together so tightly not a single sigh would pass through its sealed joints and smooth surfaces. But a movie that would breathe, and let us breathe besides it. It is high-time—now, with the new-found power and dominance of computer-generated imagery, more than ever—that we go back to Bazin, not, this time, in search of “transparency”, but of a piece of life and reality. All the other arts, wrote Rohmer, were founded on man’s presence; only cinema was founded on his absence. Not an ounce of the world remains untouched by humankind; if in order to film it, we need to manipulate it again, then what is the point… We manipulate the world; then we film nothing but our manipulation.
Things are there, why manipulate them. Let us leave the exposition of complex feelings to literature; let us leave Ossian’s somber scenery inside Young Werther; what we seek from a movie is enigmatic gestures exempt from all interpretation. A clarity of magnific signs bathing in the light of their lack of explanation.
That’s precisely what made us love Super Happy Forever (2024): in this film, everything is gently suggested, nothing is painfully imposed on the viewer. Our main character suffers and we know this not because the night seems eternal, but because a sunny beach is not enough to help him raise his shoulders.
That’s what made us love the new Hong Sang-soo. We should be more precise: we mean the one showing at this year’s festival, A Traveler’s Needs. Here we’re offered the perfect example of what we’ve been advocating for. The movie starts in medias res and it takes us a long twenty-minutes to start piecing, not even the plot together, but simply the events happening before us. Why is Huppert asking these questions, then scribbling the answers on a card and having her interlocutor read them? Then she goes to another house, and we realize she’s teaching French. Then, as if by chance, situations begin to repeat themselves, and she is led to ask the exact same question as before—and, strangely enough, she gets the same answer… The magic of cinema: in both cases, the day is equally radiant, the windows are wide open, the scenery is full of trees; yet there, the answer made us laugh, here, the answer—the same one—petrifies us and makes us cry… The magic of cinema: change nothing so that everything is different. A simple repetition reveals us something sick and rotten which we hadn’t noticed before; the movie goes from funny and light to violent and angry. Through a repetition, we realize Hong is not making fun of a particular character, who’s unwilling and unable to express her own feelings, but criticizing South Korea with the same violence of his On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). Only, here he didn’t even need the night…
That, of course, isn’t everything. As in last year’s In Water (2023), Hong takes us to the basics of his work and, keeping the ‘character development’ to a minimum and the plot as bare as possible, teaches us how to look at it. Iris, the woman played by Huppert, drinks during the whole movie yet never once raises her voice, never once talks about her feelings; on the contrary, she smiles, keeps calm, then sleeps a little… That is to say: her drinking never becomes a spectacle. Why does she drink then? Not to be more—louder, angrier—but to be less. When we find her, drunk, sleeping on the ground in the final minutes of the movie, the camera framing her in an extreme close-up never before seen in Hong’s oeuvreAlthough we can find a foreshadowing of it—an out-of-focus face in center frame—in the gas station segment near the end of Hotel by the River (2018)., not only is her face turned into a mountain—it’s Lubitsch who said that in order to film people one should first learn to film landscapes—this mountain, just like the landscapes of In Water, is out of focus… The borders of her face gently dissolve into the air around her. The individual is erased, a person is born. If people drink so much in Hong’s films, it’s not so their screams and ramblings can entertain us, it’s not so the ‘characters’ can reveal important information and advance the plot, it’s because getting drunk means becoming more vulnerable, abandoning conventions, letting sincerity finally break through the thick coat of appearances.
When we’re drunk, we (metaphorically or not, as the director in Right Now, Wrong Then, 2015) take off our clothes. Iris takes off her shoes and steps into a puddle of water. From Rohmer’s cinema Hong took many things—the bareness of means, the romantic relationships, the endless conversations—but one thing he did not take was the very French logic (from La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort to Marivaux and Beaumarchais) that structures all these carefully written love stories. No; what he took from Rohmer, most of all—and A Traveler’s Needs comes to remind us, energetically, in case we had forgotten—is the exception of The Green Ray (1986), the only movie in Rohmer’s ‘Comedies and proverbs’ series to start, not with a proverb, but with Rimbaud verses… What he took, especially, was its last scene, almost unique in the French director’s work: the sudden rupture, the dissolution, swollen eyes, trembling hands, cries, burning joy, a moment of vulnerability. A veil is lifted.
Why, at one point is asked, did Huppert’s character move to South Korea? Even if the plot may never reveal it, we very well know the answer: firstly, because French cinema is not what it used to be; if even in Patricia Mazuy’s latest (La Prisionnière de Bordeaux, 2024) Huppert has to go through so many clichés of herself, why wouldn’t she gladly search refuge abroad? Secondly, and this may sound terribly obvious, she’s there because Hong brought her. Not now, decades ago. And he housed her just like the young poet does in the movie. Huppert, a symbol of French cinema, has always been used by Hong (just like Jane Birkin in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, 2013) in very symbolic key. She doesn’t exactly play characters as much as she occupies the position of the foreigner, this almost magical other who brings rupture, change—or the promise of it—then goes away… Thus, in In Another Country (2012) she could change backgrounds three times while everyone else’s remained the same; thus, in Claire’s Camera (2017), more abstract, she could easily stand for cinema itself, with her little camera that allowed Kim Min-hee to understand why she’d been fired. And this time, going about the whole movie with her bright-green sweater, even saying at one point green is her favorite color, she’s not only the French cinema of Hong’s youth, she’s not only Chaplin, whom at one point she impersonates, she’s the green ray incarnate. Just like the green ray, she invades characters’ lives and demands of them that they reconsider their ways. She comes, and pierces through their hearts, since they hadn’t had the guts to do so themselves. The very simple lesson of this movie (Hong wouldn’t dare teach any other kind): the green ray, ultimately, wasn’t necessary. Green, be it the green of objects (a pen, curtains, a lamp) or of vegetation (more present here than in any of his other movies), green is everywhere, the world offers us infinite ‘green rays’, we have only to look the right way. “Is that the question?”, her students ask: yes, reality is but a series of questions addressed to us. Our duty is to hear them, then try to answer as best as we can.Since the completion of this piece, we have come to know the title of Hong’s next picture: What Does That Nature Say to You.
Towards the end of the movie, forced to leave the young poet’s house (his once distant mother has made him a surprise visit, France, this time, will give way to Korea), Huppert stops at a rooftop to have a smoke—nothing too different from what she’d been doing so far. Only, for some reason this rooftop, its walls, its floor, is entirely green, she’s surrounded: not by trees, but by their abstracted color—solid, bright green—in such a way that we can’t help but be reminded of a now very familiar scene, actors standing before a green screen, interacting with an imaginary scenario, just waiting to be permanently severed from the world. This time, however, the green will not be superseded in post, will not give way to a new, digital world, will on the contrary be left on the screen, garish, as evidence, screaming at our faces and demanding that we see it. Are we still able to look at things as they are? In 2012 Huppert needed to ask a monk the question “why am I miserable”, to which he answered, of course: “because you lie”. Now, free from all background, free from all intention, at the highest point of abstraction, she doesn’t need to ask a monk anything, because she is both the monk and the foreigner. We’re all travelers; she is the quintessential traveler. The only question she’s interested in now is how does one live, and she knows it’s only by living one can answer it. She wants to “test our grounding”; and if necessary she’ll violently push our feet to the ground. To those who saw in A Traveler’s Needs a light and relaxed movie we respond emphatically: no, this is Hong’s manifesto. With this simple, humble movie, he poses us the most pressing of questions. It’s our turn to hear them.
The light of day bothers Pedro Costa’s digital camera, Hong films it as it is. He doesn’t have a cinematographer either, but that doesn’t stop him: why would it? He takes everything as is, much like Roberto Rossellini, inserting in the middle of a movie, for instance, a shot of a tiger in obviously different stock (India: Matri Bhumi, 1959), or a frozen frame of a dead grand-father (Germany Year Zero, 1947)—and this without an ounce of embarrassment. Like Rossellini, Hong shows us what truly makes a movie. Away with your symmetrical compositions and precious film stock, away with your chiaroscuros and expressive shadows—away with your purity: cinema is not a way to make pretty pictures, but a way to think, and real thought takes whatever it may find on its path along with it.
A certain desire for uniformity, homogeneity, in modern cinema, betrays its impoverished state. A John Ford western is both funny and tragic, a Lubitsch comedy is both tragic and funny. To a strong mind, the world is never an impediment to thought, but its food. The unknown is not its obstacle, but its primary condition. If we decide a movie has to look a certain way from beginning to end, then we are, from the get-go, giving up most of the world—all of it that doesn’t fit our arbitrary preconditions—much like a child who’s certain of not liking a certain food without ever having tasted it. But to think is to throw oneself blindly forward.
We’d rather see a blurry cell-phone picture than a professional photograph, if it betrays a more sincere impulse towards reality. We leave pretty shots to those who have no imagination.