The Hong Sang-soo loop

Hong Sang-soo has made, at last count, more than thirty feature films. They run between 65 and 100 minutes. They are shot on digital, quickly, with small crews. The actors — Kim Min-hee (his partner and regular lead since 2015), Kwon Hae-hyo, Song Seon-mi, Ha Seong-guk — recur across films the way a theater troupe recurs in a repertory company. The settings recur: Seoul cafes, seaside towns, women's apartments with afternoon light, restaurants where someone is always drinking too much.

The complaint about Hong Sang-soo from people who have seen one or two of his films is usually some version of: "They're all the same." The complaint is not wrong. The argument for his work is not that the complaint is wrong. The argument is that "all the same" is the point.

What he actually does

The comparison that most critics reach for is Eric Rohmer, and it is not wrong — both directors make films primarily about conversation, about the gap between what people say and what they mean, about the small social transactions that constitute a life. But Rohmer's films are seasonally structured, formally elegant, in a tradition of French chamber cinema that has a legible genealogy. Hong's films come from a different place.

The closer structural comparison might be the late novels of Thomas Bernhard or the plays of Harold Pinter: work where the repetition is itself an argument about how people actually operate. Bernhard's characters state the same position in slightly different words across a hundred and fifty pages because that is what people do — they do not resolve, they restate. Hong's films show people who are stuck in patterns of behavior they cannot quite name and cannot quite escape. The male characters in particular — writers, directors, academics — are usually bad in recognizable ways: evasive, self-regarding, attracted to women who see through them and stay anyway.

The zoom — Hong uses zoom throughout his work, often at moments that feel wrong — is one of his clearest formal signatures. It functions as a kind of attention, a sudden decision by the camera to look more closely at something. It is not elegant and it is not meant to be. It is the camera noticing something it did not expect to notice.

The structure of a Hong Sang-soo film

Many of his films use structural repetition explicitly: a situation that recurs, with variations, within the same film. Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) shows the same day twice, with small differences that accumulate into a moral argument. The Day He Arrives (2011) has a protagonist who keeps ending up in the same bar with the same woman. In Another Country (2012) has three versions of a French tourist (all played by Isabelle Huppert) visiting a Korean coastal town.

The effect is closest, formally, to the way music uses theme and variation. The first statement of a theme is a question. The variations are not answers; they are further questions. A Hong film does not end with resolution because it is not organized toward resolution. It is organized toward a kind of recognition — the recognition, usually quiet and often funny, of how recognizable the human material is.

Why he is mistaken for boring

The first Hong Sang-soo film is frequently the last. The reaction is not unusual and it is not entirely unjust: if you watch Woman on the Beach (2006) without knowing what you are in for, the film's pace and its deliberate refusal of conventional dramatic escalation reads as nothing happening. The film does not foreground its own formal intelligence. It is not the kind of film that announces itself.

The films reward proximity and accumulation. The tenth Hong Sang-soo film is better than the first not because the films have improved — they have always been at roughly the same level — but because you have developed the right set of viewing habits for them. You have learned to find the jokes. (Hong is funnier than most of his critics acknowledge. The films are frequently deadpan comedies about men behaving badly.) You have learned to read the zoom. You have calibrated your expectations correctly.

The slow cinema audience — the viewers who find what they are looking for in our slow-burn collection and in the films adjacent to the slow cinema canon — often discovers Hong as a natural extension of that taste. His films are not exactly slow cinema in the Tarr or Akerman sense; they are paced like long conversations, which is what they are. But the patience they require is the same patience.

Where to start

The entry question is whether you want to start with his early work (The Power of Kangwon Province, 1998; Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, 2000 — both available with subtitles, both formally somewhat more conventionally organized than his later films) or with the Kim Min-hee period, which is where most English-speaking critics and programmers focus.

The practical recommendation is Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), which is the best single introduction to his structural method. If that works for you, The Woman Who Ran (2020) is the best single film from the Kim Min-hee period. The film page for Right Now, Wrong Then is here. And for The Woman Who Ran here.

Sources & further reading

• Criterion — essay on Hong Sang-soo's cinema of repetition
• BFI Sight & Sound — guide to Hong Sang-soo's complete films
• Martin, Adrian and Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Movie Mutations (British Film Institute, 2003) — chapter on slow cinema and the Asian art film.
• The Guardian — Hong Sang-soo interview (2021)