Berlin Review: Hong Sang-Soo’s ‘The Novelist’s Film’

Here’s another walking-and-talking film from festival favorite Hong Sang-soo, encapsulating a sliver of Korean life with his customary elusive delicacy. Shot largely in creamy black and white, Berlin competition entry The Novelist’s Film centers on the meeting between two artists who, for different reasons, have simply stopped working.

They walk through the bare trees of the wintry park, they go to eat ramen, they come up with a plan — despite the impasse each has reached on her own — to work together. By some almost imperceptible process of empathy and intellectual exchange, their creative fortunes have been reversed. At a time when so many people have been isolated, it is a hymn to the galvanizing spark of collaboration.

Director Hong is also his own writer, producer, editor and composer, but it is clear that he too finds an important collaborative connection with his actors. Lee Hye-young plays Junhee, a hitherto prolific novelist who visits a former fellow writer who now runs a bookshop outside Seoul, then takes a walk with a film director who, we gather, was once planning to adapt one of her books.

Even among the bowing, exchange of compliments and mutual deferral required by Korean courtesy, Junhee is clearly a prickly customer. Forget those meek, eternally girlish women who decorate other kinds of Korean film; Junhee has left that well behind. When she and the director run into Kilsoo (Kim Min-hee), a famous actress Junhee immediately announces she hugely admires, the fur begins to fly. Kilsoo says she has not taken a role for a long time. She can’t or won’t explain why. “What a waste!” says the director, repeatedly. Still so young and wasting her life!

This is Junhee’s cue finally to erupt with the acrimony she has clearly had brewing for the last half-hour. How can he say someone else is wasting her life? If she took dozens of roles in big commercial films, would that mean she was no longer wasting it? Waste! What a word to use! Think about what it means! Is she a child? She has made a choice! The force and fire of this argument, along with its small repetitions, has the immediacy of improvisation. Whatever, it is the catalyst for what comes next: Junhee’s admission of a life-long dream of directing a film.

She hasn’t written a novel for a long time; she feels she has reached the end of a long road with her descriptive, plotless writing style and is unsure how to remake herself into a different kind of writer. Writing a film, however — especially a film for her new friend — would be a different matter. The idea bubbles through further meetings: with Kilsoo’s nephew, a film student who could be their cinematographer, who joins them in the park, after which they return to the bookshop for a very Korean drinking session with a visiting poet it transpires Junhee knew in her younger and wilder days. Again, tensions run around the table like an electric current; these older writers clearly bristle with a lifetime’s disappointments.

We never see the novelist’s film. We don’t need to see it. What we see is some fun footage of Kilsoo in the park as the seasons change, holding a bunch of wildflowers, giggling at the camera and her nephew behind it as they horse around, playing at making a film. “We can shoot this in color!” he says; the screen lights up. Making the novelist’s film wasn’t easy, the nephew confesses; they watched it hundreds of times in the editing room. But they did it. Kilsoo goes to see it in a screening room; there is no clue when she emerges as to what she thought. Rather than sharing a sense of completion, the film makes it clear that this is the flow of creative life. They will keep working. It’s what they do.