in water (Hong Sang-soo, 2023) (Patreon)

Allegedly kept out of the Berlinale competition for being "too weird," in water certainly has the hallmarks of radical new direction, for any filmmaker really but especially one who so often gets the bum rap of all his films being the same. No one will mistake in water for any other Hong Sang-soo film. While it will probably frustrate newcomers to Hongland, people like me who've been following his career for decades are prepared to absorb the shock and puzzle over what this bizarre featurette is trying to tell us.

Most artworks have what the Russian Formalists called a "dominant," a fundamental creative decision that serves to organize all the other ones, and in water has a hell of a dominant. While it's accurate to say that the film is never in focus, this only hints at the strange effects of this blurred cinematography. For one thing, it doesn't stay out of focus in the same way; sometimes shots are hazy and impressionistic, but at other times the focus is just a tad off, total clarity dangled before us but always beyond reach.

In water is a film about the making of a film, one that is made very much like Hong film -- no script, basic outline, on-location improvisation. An actor, Seong-mo (Shin Seok-ho), recruits two school friends to help him make his first film. As he explains, he wants to discover whether or not he has talent. As he explains to Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk) and Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun), he is not pursuing money or success but "honor," in the sense that he wants to leave something meaningful behind, if he is in fact capable.

Even by Hong's minimalist standards, very little happens in the first half of in water. But regular viewers will notice small discrepancies. The group drinks cola at dinner, and then milk at lunch, and only much later does soju make an appearance. And where most of Hong's mature films are about older artists who have already attained success (filmmakers, novelists, poets, painters), in water goes back in time, offering a central protagonist who does not even know if he has a creative future. While in theory this could provide a newfound hope for Hong, a wistful look back at his salad days, in water proves to be one of the most mournful, passively nihilistic films he's ever made.

For reasons probably best left unexplained, Hong's latest reminds me of a mid-period Nagisa Oshima film called The Man Who Left His Will on Film. That film, experimental even by Oshima's late-60s standards, is about a radical film student who essentially sets out to record his life and surroundings, in order to discover whether there is anything worth saving from oblivion. It's very much in the fashionable, aesthetico-communist mold of the era, when folks were a lot more confident about the urge to destroy being a creative urge. 

Hong, of course, bears little relationship to Oshima, in either style or sensibility. However there is definitely a sense that Hong is both pushing his unique brand of filmmaking as far as it can possibly go, while at the same time gently blowing it to smithereens. It will be interesting to see where Hong goes from here, whether this is merely a bump along his well-trod creative road or if it genuinely represents a point of no return.