Right Sketch, Wrong Skit: Sangsoo Scans Patterns in Bittersweet Interludes
Perspectives of regret and the uncertain odyssey of retrospection emphasize the undertones of perennial auteur Hong Sangsoo’s latest, By the Stream (his second premiere of the year following A Traveler’s Needs). While its title is reminiscent of any number of Sangsoo narratives, which tend to be tied to various forms of landscape, like beaches, hills, rivers, or mountains, his latest is a more melancholic, reflective departure, and (at least for Sangsoo) contains more pointed cultural critiques in the subtext than per usual. While there’s plenty of eating, drinking (and the guilty pleasure of smoking cigarettes), an assortment of patterns emerge in the eddies of its straightforward story.
Jeonim (Kim Min-hee) is a young lecturer at an all-women’s university who has been forced to find a fast solution to a difficult problem. In the school’s annual skit contest, in which all departments must participate, her seven students have suddenly become three because their student director, a handsome young man named Junwon, was dating three of them at separate times. Now, the remaining four are in somewhat of a tricky situation since participation is mandatory. Thus, Jeonim calls upon her uncle, Chu Seion (Kwon Haw-hyo), a retired actor who now runs a bookstore in Gangneung. The two of them haven’t spoken for ten years, and it’s a warm reunion. Writing his own skit for the girls to perform, they spend the next ten days rehearsing their ten-minute scene. Meanwhile, Professor Jong (Cho Yunhee), a fan of Jeonim’s uncle (who also was responsible for securing Jeonim’s position at the university), takes the two of them out to dinner, where it seems a new friendship (or more) is born. As he also learns about his niece’s own burgeoning artistry through her tapestries, he admits he’s eager to stage the skit seeing as he’d also done this at the same school forty years prior.
Like many of Sangsoo’s films before it, the narrative is carried by Kim Min-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo, whose ten year estrangement is politely overlooked by both parties in the essence of saving time and getting down to this skit business. Through various conversations, we learn Chu Sieon was once a notable actor, still recognized by the public today, but his critique of another notable figure found him ostensibly blacklisted. Jeonim, now in her forties, is just beginning to stretch her own wings as an artist, weaving tapestries on her loom of various stretches of water on the Han River. Notably, she’s working her way backwards through its streams, creating patterns from her sketchbook which she works on at a desolate spot by a stream. We also learn Jeonim had a ‘mystical experience’ while enrolled in an engineering program, an occupation she had no interest in. After having bled profusely from her eyes for three consecutive days, she woke up to blue skies, motivating her to withdraw from the program the same day.
It’s immediately clear an attraction exists between Jeonim’s boss and mentor (Cho Yunhee, another Sangsoo alum, this time fulfilling the role of the droll older woman who seems ready for an exciting experience). Jeonim seems vaguely dismayed at the affair blooming before her eyes, perhaps because it’s representative of another romantic entanglement which could compromise the turmoiled skit. What feels rare for Sangsoo is we eventually get to see the performance, which seems ripped from a Communist propaganda playbook about four young women eating the last of their dwindling ramen supply as they cheerfully vow to conserve their goods whilst bookended by the shadow of a net and a blaring industrial roar. The president of the university is concerned about the performance after realizing it was penned by Jeonim’s infamous uncle (who we also learn does not speak to his own sister for accusing him of being a commie a decade ago).
In true Sangsoo fashion, all’s well that ends well, but of all the weepy, Soju-saturated scenes from his filmography, perhaps one of his best occurs here as an increasingly drunken Hae-hyo nurses old wounds by confessing his past wrongs towards a first love at the same university, and the four students all share their own emotional vulnerabilities through a haze of euphoric camaraderie. Sweet, and like all of Sangsoo’s work, never overstated, it leaves the indelible impression of how sometimes, going all the way back to the origin sometimes doesn’t yield the answers we’re looking for.
Reviewed on August 16th at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival (77th edition) — Concorso Internazionale section. 111 Mins.
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
