Tale Of Cinema (2005) is the second film I’ve seen by the prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and apparently this is the first one where he started using zooms? A scene will be playing out in a master shot and then the camera will zoom in, resetting the frame, almost haphazardly and amateurish, but definitely with purpose. Sang-soo’s body of work, as I understand it, are movies where characters talk, walk around, drink beer occasionally or sing karaoke, but everything is quite understated and matter-of-fact. Comparable to Eric Rohmer in that they feel like very simple stories where characters converse and not much happens. Deceptively simple as the themes emerge more in thinking about them afterwards, particularly with Tale Of Cinema, which is quite meta-textual, beginning with one narrative and set of characters, then stopping to reset with another and allowing the audience to see the clear parallels. The first story is about a young man (Lee Ki-woo) who meets a friend (Uhm Ji-won) by chance; they go out and get drunk, and things take a darker, sadder turn with how lost the boy feels and that he wants to take his own life. The second story shifts from someone we immediately empathise with to someone who is harder to take and not very sympathetic, a switch that I was quite tickled by. The next protagonist is a wannabe director in his 30s (Kim Sang-kyung) who is grouchy and jealous over his lack of a filmmaking career. He also meets someone unexpectedly on the street, an actress (also played by Uhm Ji-won) and tries to strike up a meeting. I loved Kim Sang-kyung in this role; he doesn’t seem that obnoxious on the surface, and remains a funny presence even when he is being annoying to the people around him. As a director, Sang-soo observes everyone from a detached perspective, but there remains a certain wry connection to them, even when they are at their most pathetic or unguarded. Cinema is a tale that both inspires us and lies to us, a reflection and a fantasy, and the film is lightly and satirically observational about all of this. Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 