Filmmakers like to call themselves storytellers for the same reason that politicians like to call themselves public servants: it’s a show of deference toward a popular ideal. Yet few of them treat stories as their fundamental unit of creation. One who does so is the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, whose narrative imagination is so fertile that “prolific” might as well be part of his name. He has developed a system of low-budget and D.I.Y. production that enables him to make many movies quickly. Moreover, the films that have emerged—twenty-five features since 2010—suggest that his casual observations are instantly crystallized not in the form of images or characters, moods or even ideas, but as full-blown dramas. His latest release, “What Does That Nature Say to You,” which screened in last year’s New York Film Festival and is opening February 27th, is the fictional synthesis of a car, a house, and a bottle. It’s also one of the few movies of his that, were it transcribed and handed over to a mediocre director, would still bear the same spark of life, even if it wouldn’t similarly catch emotional and aesthetic fire.
Here, the art house meets the Fockers, albeit with an air of mystery and wisdom that, from the start, sets it apart from simpler or more blatant approaches to the subject. A youngish couple is parked at a roadside in rural South Korea, near a river and facing some mountains: Kim Junhee (Kang Soyi) is returning home to visit her parents. Her boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), whom they have never met, has driven her there and is dropping her off. He admires the family’s house, perched high on a mountainside, initially from afar, and she invites him to come up and see it. The resulting encounters with her family—her father, Kim Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo); her mother, Choi Sunhee (Cho Yunhee); and her sister, Kim Neunghee (Park Miso)—are the catalysts of revelations that prove consequential for the couple and the family alike.
Hong’s method is akin to drypoint: a sort of Impressionism of spontaneity, intricacy, and solidity, in which the rapid gesture gains in weight as it’s extended in time. He relies on copious, blunt, expressive, and philosophically reflective dialogue that is nonetheless entirely in keeping with the personalities of the speakers and with the immediate logic of the action. Like all melodramatists, Hong deals in coincidence and magnifies casual connections and minor accidents into life-shaking events. Without restraining his characters’ relentless forward motion with exposition, he finds them burdened by their past and revealing it in brief but incendiary flashes at unguarded moments of conversation. As ever in Hong’s movies, one of the key looseners of such talk is alcohol—which, here, takes on a peculiarly gendered role, as Oryeong, quickly bonding with Donghwa by admiring the oddity and beauty of the younger man’s thirty-year-old car, breaks out a bottle of makgeolli and then another—and then, at dinner, serves him some fine whiskey.
The men’s admiration is mutual: Donghwa is struck by the beauty of the family home and is amazed when Junhee tells him that her father designed it himself. He did so, she adds, for his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted. Oryeong did even more for her, it turns out—he landscaped the mountainside for her pleasure and comfort during her final illness. Donghwa—who’s revealed to be thirty-five—rhapsodizes about Oryeong’s devotion, and filial piety over all, although (and, perhaps, because) his own family bonds are strained. Donghwa’s father is rich and famous, familiar to Junhee’s family as Attorney Ha. Junhee’s sister says she’s sure that this “huge halo effect” must make Donghwa look all the better to her parents. Yet Donghwa, a poet, has a frayed relationship with him and prefers to maintain financial independence, though it means making a meagre living as a part-time wedding videographer. He devotes most of his time to his writing, with little to show for it but some publications in small magazines. His enthusiasm for poetry is shared by Junhee’s mother, Sunhee, who also writes, in her spare time, and has also published a bit. The uneasy overlap of enthusiasms and concerns, the grinding mesh of art and money, the diverging varieties of responsibility and independence yield a volatile dramatic mix that’s put under ever-greater pressure by a literal confinement in what turns out to be an apocalyptic dinner, a grand conflagration over the course of twenty minutes that is a set piece for the ages.