The Novelist's Film (2022)

The Novelist’s Film is one of three films by the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo to be released stateside this year. As one of the most prolific filmmakers currently alive (having released fifteen films since 2013, nearly 30 since 1996), a multi-release year is not uncommon for Hong. The prolific director has maintained such an impressive rate of filmic output by accomplishing what the great luminaries of the French New Wave believed to be a necessary philosophy for the artistic integrity of cinema: returning the means of production to the hands of the auteurs and abolishing the confines of time and money. Production, craft, and profit are hardly complementary ingredients, but Hong is able to make movies that align with his artistic and personal vision by vesting control in a small number of collaborators. Aside from the cast of actors (eight are credited), the film credits Kim Min-hee (Hong’s recurring collaborator and partner) as production manager, Seo Ji-hoon for sound, and Hong Sang-soo as director, writer, cinematographer, editor, producer, and musical composer. As a screenwriter, Hong rarely prepares scenes more than a day in advance of shooting, which lends his films a uniquely 1:1 parity with reality, dialogue-heavy without feeling scripted. Hong has refined a specific style of filmmaking that reflects his own life as a filmmaker while reframing the domestic realism of human relationships and quotidien coincidences as surreal, ethereal, galvanizing, and tender. The distinctions between off-screen reality and the narratives within his films become so blurred that a viewer is left with the impression that, to the director, cinema and life are practically indistinguishable, that the uniquely expressive soul of cinema is the same nuance that we experience in everyday interactions. The film is comprised of a series of meetings, interactions, and conversations that may seem cyclical, but Hong’s gentle care imbues each scenario with a sense of magic that transcends the trivial. The plot of The Novelist's Film evokes the genesis of the movie itself, presented through the pace, staging, and happenstance that is indicative of Hong’s body of work. Largely taking place over one afternoon, a successful novelist suffering from writer’s block, Junhee (Lee Hye-Yeong