Introduction (2021, Hong Sang-soo) (Patreon)

38/100

Okay, it's starting to seem as if maybe somebody bet Hong a large sum of money (or many bottles of soju) that he couldn't make a film composed exclusively of banal connective tissue, with everything of import exported offscreen. Others seem to dig this recent phase (which includes, to my mind, The Woman Who Ran, The Day After and Grass; I omit Hotel by the River, which seems like a startling outlier; haven't yet seen the new one), and perhaps they'll perceive Introduction as its apotheosis—Hong pared down to his oblique essence, wholly freed at last from the unnecessary strictures of conventional dramaturgy. Let my praise for Claire's Camera serve as evidence that I don't exactly demand fireworks from this dude myself. But give me something. Working up the energy to speculate about what we don't see requires not being lulled into a stupor by what we do, and virtually every minute of this mini-feature consists of flat, repetitive, essentially expository ground-laying for (or recaps of) events that aren't in the movie. In theory, that should lend enormous weight to any climactic rupture, but the actor's indignant tirade in response to his protégé having balked at a kissing scene ("Whether sincere or playing around, it's all love!") in no way encapsulates what's preceded it. The structure and title suggest a treatise on life-altering decisions inspired by chance encounters, but nothing in the present tense—including what appears to be a dream sequence, though Hong pulls the ol' Night and Day let's-provide-no-signifiers routine—develops that idea in any way. Consequently, I wound up more interested in a couple of ultra-vague references to the pandemic (of a nearly empty restaurant: "People will come back") and may have spent more time reading about the Korean language's insane levels of formal and informal speech than I did watching the film itself.