(Hong Sang-soo, 2024, South Korea, 111 Minutes)
Men usually do most of the drinking in Hong's films, but not always.
And that's certainly true of By the Stream. I enjoyed spending time with these creative people, who embody three different generations, with 40-year-old Jeonim as the midway between the students and the professor, but I'm not sure what it all means, other than that people can change--if they want to.
It wouldn't be a Hong Sang-soo film if the characters didn't include an artist of some kind, if his partner (Kim Min-hee, winner of the Best Performance Award at Locarno) wasn't involved, and if someone didn't end up drinking too much.
As his 32nd film begins, after last year's Traveler's Needs with Isabelle Huppert, Jeonim (Kim), a textile artist and instructor at a women's university in Seoul, meets up with her long-lost uncle, Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo, in his 10th Hong film), a former television actor and director who has traveled from coastal Gangneung, where he runs a bookshop, to write and stage a short play with her students.
Junwoo, the previous director (Ha Seong-guk, a frequent Hong player who last appeared in Traveler's Needs), got the boot after dalliances with three of the performers, though he's a student himself, possibly a graduate student. He will return later in an attempt to finish a few of the things he started.
Sieon, as it turns out, has a history with the school, which he will reveal toward the end.
When Jeonim introduces him to her mentor, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee, Kwon's wife and another Hong veteran), an attractive and vivacious professor who adores his work, she offers to take them both out for dinner and drinks, where she admires the older man's "upper body." Jeonim looks simultaneously amused and embarrassed, but it's a mutual appreciation society, since Jeong feels that Jeonim is "a real treasure," not least because the students love her. The three, all beautifully played by actors attuned to the director's unique rhythms and techniques, will continue to enjoy more dinners and more drinks, a staple of Hong's cinema.
Jeonim drinks so much during one outing that she sets up a blanket and a lamp in the dark outside her studio in order to sober up. She's soon joined by students who want to get in on the campfire-like fun. It's one of a few nearly pitchblack sequences in which she and/her students commune in the dark (though the four young actors are quite good, their characters aren't distinguished by name.)
Jeonim is, in other words, a unique individual. As glamorous as Kim has appeared in pre-Hong films, like Park Chan-wook's erotic thriller The Handmaiden (below left), Jeonim favors shapeless outfits with roomy pockets. The former engineering student carries a sketchbook and watercolor kit everywhere she goes, so she can draw or paint as the mood strikes. Both her paintings and loom-woven pieces use water as a motif.
Though she’s grateful to Sieon for helping with the play, she's concerned that he might be interested in Jeong. Since she has nothing but respect for the professor, her wariness comes across as jealousy or protectiveness, even if it isn't either; it could just be curiosity. Though Hong's films are dialogue-driven, that doesn't mean he spells things out. He really doesn't.
Sieon has a romantic history of which he isn't proud, in addition to some sort of scandal that led to his abandonment of acting, whereas Junwoo doesn’t feel he did anything wrong, but maybe someday, he'll learn to see things more clearly and take responsibility for his transgressions.
Jeonim doesn't really change by the end, in part because she already made a significant change when she switched from engineering to art after a rather disturbing and unexplainable phenomenon a few years before. Hong gives no indication she needs to make any changes, other than to suggest, with the professor's blessing, that she might take Jeong's place someday.
The filmmaker never defines her sexuality either, which is unusual for his work. The unisex outfits and lack of apparent interest in romance could mean anything, or nothing. She could be gay, straight, or disinterested one way or the other. It never comes up. She's an artist. She loves her work, she loves her students, she loves her mentor, she loves fried eel and ramen, and she loves her mother and her uncle–even if they can’t stand each other.
I don't think By the Stream was intended as a film about love, but rather regrets and new beginnings. For me, though, that's what resonated most.
By the Stream plays Northwest Film Forum Aug 23 and 29-31. I've never met a Hong Sang-soo film I didn't like, but my favorite is the B&W Novelist's Film, about a writer who makes a breakthrough. With his 33rd film in the can, he's now working on the 34th. I've written about Oki's Movie, Nobody's Daughter Haewon, Our Sunhi, On the Beach at Night Alone, The Novelist's Film, Walk Up, and In Our Day--a mere 25% of his unstoppable output.
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