In Front of Your Face

Directed by Hong Sang-soo

Running time: 1hr25 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

In Front of Your Face

So casually prolific is South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo that those of us who keep up with his ever-expanding oeuvre risk treating each new film from him as a variation on a theme, a piece of a puzzle, an extra course on a tasting menu, rather than an individual entity. In Front of Your Face already isn’t his most recent work (it premiered at Cannes only last year, and he’s unveiled two films since) but it doesn’t blend into his history in quite the same way that other perfectly delightful Hong diversions do: there’s a yearning, plaintive emotional tenor to it, a crisp aesthetic definition, that has kept it in my mind for the better part of 18 months. Just as well, then, that it’s the first of his films in some time to get a UK cinema release: it has pleasures to offer newcomers and acolytes alike.

That crossover is appropriate for a wistful character study of a woman caught between lives old and new, undecided if she’s coming or going. His chicly pensive leading lady here is Lee Hye-young, a veteran Korean star who, following an extended career hiatus, has latterly become Hong’s chief muse; in the kind of playful thematic echo typical of the director’s work, she plays Sangok, a once-celebrated actor returning to Seoul after years away in the States. She stays with her sister, though the two women act as cordial strangers. She fixes a meeting with an admiring director in the hope of getting her career back on track, though their encounter lurches from professional to personal with disorienting speed — her most closely guarded secret spilling out with generously poured liquor (another signature Hong trope). And she returns to a past home, an outing that at least goes to plan in its nostalgic melancholy.

These are small parcels of time that add up, ever so gradually, to heavier baggage. Regret and desire are masked with wry good humour: in one wonderful scene of spontaneous, undisciplined, sweetly deranged laughter, those feelings all come together in messy but perfectly relatable fashion. Most of Hong’s recent work has been shot in airy black-and-white; In Front of Your Face stands out for its stabs of saturated Crayola brightness, its emotional extremes sometimes literally highlighted for us amid the film’s droll everyday observation. Sometimes life is in Technicolour, sometimes it’s a rainy day — here, more often than not, it’s both.

IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE (DANGSIN-EOLGUL-APESEO) (2021) Written, shot and edited by Hong Sang-soo