Tale of Cinema

( Hong Sang-soo , South Korea / France)

On both narrative and formal levels, Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema is a perplexing, passive-aggressive film. Hong augments his recent approach—a rigorous but flattened visual style largely comprised of static, unadorned two-shots—with odd new elements, such as a voiceover and an incessant use of the zoom lens, but without smoothly integrating them into his style. So far the critical response has been paradoxical. Some see Hong as having made the same film yet again, while others consider Tale’s formal oddities an impediment to the director’s recurrent themes. But, in fact, Tale expands on Hong’s preoccupations with a renewed conceptual depth. While it may be a tough film to love, it is also Hong’s finest work to date, marking a bold new direction just when Hong is most in need of a fresh start. In Turning Gate (2002) and especially Woman is the Future of Man (2004), the intra-frame complexities of Hong’s earliest films had given way to a rather visually transparent cinema of male embarrassment. The radical break that Hong achieves with Tale isn’t just the reappearance of a more complex cinematic vocabulary, but a newfound determination to engrain his protagonists’ lurching uncertainty and perceptual ambivalence into the film’s very form. Hong is no longer leveling judgment from outside, triangulating his auto-critique through various diegetic stand-ins. Formally, Tale continually points to the man behind the camera: Hong, and the cinema itself, are both fully implicated.

The first 40 minutes of Tale of Cinema are the short film-within-a-film of Yi Hyong-su, an ailing filmmaker whose work is being featured at a cinematheque retrospective. As the Yi film concludes, we meet Tong-su (Kim Sang-kyung), a member of Yi’s old posse who is convinced that he’s the model for Yi’s protagonist. Once Yi’s film ends, the voiceover is suspended. But the aggressive use of the zoom lens carries over from Yi’s film to “Hong’s film”—the story of Tong-su and his interactions with Yong-sil, the lead actress in the Yi short. In both parts of Tale, these zooms radically exclude portions of the characters’ worlds, dramatizing shifts in their self-involvement. We could say these zooms take us out of an open, fluid Renoirian world into a character-driven, action-oriented cinematic world, via the “philosophized” zoom lens of Michael Snow. As in Wavelength (1967), the zoom in Tale of Cinema serves as a bridge, taking the viewer from the multivalent life-world into the more limited world of human attention. Hong is dramatizing not only how narrow the world becomes when reduced to immediate “human interest,” but the way that cinema encourages this exclusion. When this tendency is harnessed to the narrow imperative of narration, only what drives the story forward (in our lives as well as in the films we watch) has a compelling reason to appear in the field of vision, or even to exist at all.

This is where things get interesting. Not only are the zooms obtrusive, they are also very weird: neither graceful like Tarkovsky’s, nor dramatic like Fassbinder’s; moving us around within individual scenes, as with Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) or certain Dogme 95 films, but without vérité immediacy. Nearly every shot in Tale relies on these zooms, and while it is evident to the viewer that each and every take must be choreographed with extreme care, the zooms are far from “masterful.” They aren’t fast enough to be jarring, nor slow enough to emphasize the inexorable pull of cinematic time. They simply move us around inside single set-ups in almost exactly the same way as conventional editing. They shift our attention, and insist on letting us know when and how they do so. As such, Hong’s zooms hover between grace and clumsiness, producing an almost intolerable hyper-naturalism. It’s as though Hong has thoughtfully guided our presumed attention through tableau after tableau, all in order to elicit an unconscious protestation—“that’s not where my eyes were going.”

This controlled awkwardness is matched in the first part of Tale of Cinema by a melodramatic plot, performed with a stilted, deliberate manner that, like the zooms, is somewhat difficult to parse. Is Hong approximating the jerky rhythms of a student film? The Yi short involves a young man and woman becoming sexually involved, then suddenly forging a suicide pact. Character motivation is elided as incidents hurtle by, failing to convince as either drama or Brechtian demonstration. A Hongian narrative of miscommunication and misread signals is, in turn, miscommunicated, and the viewer is hard-pressed to determine whether or not this is intentional. But the second part of Tale shifts pace, following Tong-su, convinced that Yi’s film is a direct transcription of the events of his own life, through a more causally organized narrative as he stalks the actress Yong-sil, attempting to replicate the fictional(ized) onscreen relationship and assuming she will dutifully play her role.

Tong-su possesses the same self-delusion characteristic of Hong’s earlier male protagonists, albeit exponentially enlarged. Coming on like Asperger’s syndrome, he cannot read conversational cues or observe basic social niceties; he throws out non-sequiturs and announces his sexual intentions with ejaculatory candor. It’s as though Hong’s prior concerns with the ways in which storytelling shapes subjectivity have crystallized into an understanding of how cinema, when confused with life itself, exerts a unique power to short-circuit the ability to relate to other human beings. Hong’s usual tale of masculinity is, in effect, a tale of cinema. Tong-su tries and fails to direct real life as if he were the director-star of his own movie. This relates not only to the eerily stylized performances of the first half—did Yi really observe Tong-su and build a film around his handicap, or has Tong-su identified with a cinematic mirror whose distortions only he fails to recognize?—but to the Yi film’s third-person narration as well. While it appears to have evaporated once Tong-su’s story (“the real world”) begins, Hong brings the narrator back one last time at the end of his film. “I have to think,” the narrator says. “To get out of all this. To live a long time.”

Is this Hong’s memo to himself, a reminder that as a man of the cinema, Tong-su’s tendencies are also his own, ones he can avert only with concerted effort? This remains unclear, but I do believe these words bring Tale full circle, and perhaps explain its lukewarm reception. Tale seems to suggest that we can never think about cinema and experience it at the same time. Only by subverting cinema’s hypnotic power can we avoid trying to live through it. In order to test this hypothesis, Tale forces thought by making cinema strange. Hong’s filmmaking has broken through to a new level of self-awareness, renouncing mastery in favour of “bad form,” clumsy gropes toward insoluble aporias. With its inscrutable performances and a runaway zoom lens that works overtime just to lay itself bare, Tale embodies willful incomprehension, skillfully constructing itself as the cinematic version of Tong-su himself: someone we try to avoid at all costs because, once we’re stranded in his presence, we simply don’t know what to say.

—Michael Sicinski

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