'In Front Of Your Face': Hong Sang-soo Poignant Drama Asks How To Live Happily In The Past, Present & Future [Cannes Review]

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

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The film opens in a bare highrise apartment, where a beautiful woman watches another as she sleeps. Once the latter wakes up, and as the two of them talk and walk around a park in Seoul, it becomes clear that they are sisters who haven’t seen each other in a very long time. Sangok (Lee Hye-young), the older of the two, has a thin and elegant frame as well as a patient attitude, while her young sister Jeongok (Jo Yoon-hee) is slightly more lively and at ease. The contrast makes sense, as Sangok is naturally a little overwhelmed by her return to her native country after many years spent working and living in America. But in how she takes the time to look at her sister and take in her surroundings, it is clear something else is on her mind. A handful of moments across the film with her thoughts heard in voiceover reveal her to be going through a deeply existential period of her life, in which she is telling herself always to try and live in the present. 

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The fear of a sometimes deadly virus and the inability to project ourselves in an uncertain future has similarly pushed many of us to try and seize the day. Perhaps this situation was the inspiration for Hong Sangsoo’s film. In any case, the familiarity of the feeling might be one reason why it does not take too long to understand why Sangok is trying to hold on to the here and now. But before the cause behind her humble and wise perspective is clearly spelled out, we have the pleasure of following her as she hangs out with her sister and meets her nephew. She is extremely touched when the boy she hasn’t seen in years gifts her a wallet before he rushes off to work at his mother’s small restaurant: Sangok is on a different, slower timeline than the rest of the film’s characters, but she does not seem to mind or harbor any resentment towards any of them for it. These small clashes of different temperaments and moods are as touching as ever under Hong Sangsoo’s unobtrusive direction, open to all nuances of human behavior.

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Even more moving, and sketched out with a few select brushstrokes typical of the director’s economic style, is Sangok’s peaceful reaction to the casually confrontational comments of her sister. Although the latter remains polite and does try not to let her bitterness spill out too much, she still begrudges Sangok for her decision to go live in the US years ago and for not coming to visit more often. The older sister is reluctant to discuss the past, but not out of irritation — rather, it seems she simply does not find it interesting. After all, the past is no more, and discussing it is a useless distraction from the present: she prefers to comment on the view from the cafe they stop by, and on their walk, she pauses to look at a bright bed of flowers. When a passerby in the park recognizes her from a role she played on television years ago, her sister is astonished that this brief brush with fame would have such a lasting impact, but Sangok herself barely reacts at all. The only moment when she appears to dip a toe in her past carefully is when she decides to visit what used to be her childhood home. Far from upset at how it has changed, she seems most of all grateful and happily sits down to chat with the new owner. She slowly walks around the place as if trying to remember what it used to look like, all the while imprinting on her memory the way it is now.

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It is the future, not the past, that threatens to undermine Sangok’s incredibly zen attitude during her meeting at a bar with the filmmaker Jaewon (Kwon Hae-hyo), a figure which appears in some ways to be one of Hong Sangsoo’s frequent, somewhat parodic stand-ins for himself. The director is another fan of Sangok and wants to cast her in his next film, which forces her to reveal why this cannot happen. After several bottles of soju, however, Jaewon gets an idea, and the film’s luminous, funny and bittersweet denouement revolves around this unexpected possibility of a project Sangok can look forward to and of a way to leave a stronger mark on the world. Despite being shot during the pandemic, “In Front of Your Face” is one of the South Korean director’s most open films of late, poignant in its use of a simple structure to touch on the eminently difficult question of how to live happily between past, present, and future. [A]

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