Chicago International Film Festival: Film #14

After the shocking reset with The Novelist’s Film, Hong Sang-soo began to see cinema in a different light. He saw it as a means of experimentation and exploration, which aren’t foreign to him if you’re a devoted fan like myself, but there’s something about the string of films after that one that feel so confrontational and interrogative, not to mention deeply introspective. Hong’s films are personal for obvious reasons, but they’re also personal for the unknown ones. By the Stream is Hong’s most overtly “Hongian film,” equipped with the tentpole elements that make a Hong Sang-soo film a recognizable one: the discussions of art, the bottles of booze, the complex dynamics between characters, romances and passions, and the dreams that often remain stagnant in our current state. But Hong doesn’t view these elements as he did before. In By the Stream, Hong is confronting himself directly, as he’s been doing since The Novelist’s film, with a means to understand his own psyche.

Why does he feel the need to see his characters bond over booze and cigarettes? Why does he need his characters to have a meal together, usually a plate of delicious looking foods that would make even the most full individual crave something off of their plates? Why do his characters need to discuss their feelings about romance and cinema (or art as a generalized term)? Hong is questioning the very motives of his cinematic storytelling, the elements that make him one of the greatest filmmakers in the world. Hong’s characters are typically ones who dream of something more – I think back to in water last year, where the determination to make cinema seemed to reflect his own passion for the artform – but in By the Stream, it’s not hard to note that the hope often associated with his characters within these types of Hongian parameters feels a bit off. Characters do discuss themselves in an intimate way, but there’s a sense of hopelessness that flutters around; Hong’s characters have seen that hope fly away.

By the Stream is a film that forces Hong to question the brevity of his actions as a filmmaker. You could sift through Hong’s body of work and notice that in most of his films, alcohol is used as a way to push the plot, engage in difficult conversations, and find comfort in a shared experience. But what Hong doesn’t seem to allude to is the dependency on alcohol to function in situations and scenarios. By the Stream feels like the most confrontational and overt in this way, placing the camera in its stagnant position to merely capture this dependency. The amount of bottles surrounding everyone feels more weighted, the pauses in-between conversations feels more emotional. There’s a growing addiction that unfolds in By the Stream for Jeonim, who sees her uncle and her advisor succumb to the Hongian abundance of booze consumption, while she desperately wants to prevent that from happening. But by the end, we see how futile that has been for her. We see her outcome.

Why do his characters depend on alcohol and cigarettes in order to function properly? By the Stream is a lonely film about the fading dreams that plagues his characters and that quiet realization that the passage of time has forced these dreams to become even more impossible than they originally were. These vices, these self-destructive and decaying vices, become a mask for his characters to feel something other than the overwhelming sense of dread and that recognition that so much time has passed. Hong sees himself in several of these characters – specifically Sieon, Jeonim’s uncle – because they’ve walked down similar paths that he’s voyaged down. But what makes By the Stream so alarming as a film is its final image, a freeze frame that left me feeling so many different emotions. The struggles of existence are felt by anyone who has endured the difficulties that life has thrown at them, but Hong wants us to remember the people who’ve helped us along the way – the freeze frame is devastating, given its placement in the film, but also comforting in seeing that despite the world’s constant abandonment, Hong still has one thing he can love more than anything.

This is a very revealing Hong and it’s one of his absolute greatest films.