The spoiler about Hong Sangsoo’s In Water has nothing to do with anything in its meager plot. It has to do with the main formal decision to present almost the entire thing out-of-focus, so, from a critical viewpoint, revealing that aspect to readers is more of a caveat than a spoiler. Hong aficionados could be put off by this revelation because they will see the movie anyway, but everyone else may appreciate the intelligence because if they didn’t know what to expect and then sat down to a film that was blurry for almost its entire length, they very well might feel cheated. There are a number of possible reasons for this odd decision, but Hong is notoriously fickle about the Gestalt of his films. Everything is geared toward a certain outcome that he may not actually have figured out until the movie has already been shot, and I assume that’s what happened here. (During a Q&A following the festival screening I attended, the cast admitted that they didn’t know the film would be out-of-focus until they saw it in completed form at another, earlier festival screening) The story, as it were, is essentially about how he himself makes movies in his own peculiar way. 

The protagonist, Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho), is a novice filmmaker who is planning a feature with his crew and cast in a location by the sea. It’s clear from the beginning that Seoung-mo has no script and not much of an idea about what kind of movie he wants to make. He wants the setting to dictate all that, and the tension generated during the film is based on how this lack of foresight and assertion affects those who have invested their time in an artistic vision that they soon realize doesn’t exist. The entire movie is about scouting the location, since almost no actual filming is done until the end. As is often the case in a Hong feature, there’s a lot of conversation over meals and drinks, and for once these epicurean episodes have consequences, since Seoung-mo has a very limited budget and the more he spends on non-filmic elements like food the less he will have to complete the project. Eventually, the director’s indecisiveness starts to irk his DP, Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk), and sorely inconvenience his overly indulgent lead actor, Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun), thus lending the whole movie an atmosphere of impatience and discomfort. When Seoung-mo finally gets around to shooting a scene, it’s based on something he just observed—a woman cleaning up trash on the beach—and whose meaning he doesn’t fully understand and thus can’t convey to his actors. 

Close followers of Hong will understand that this amorphous storyline mimics Hong’s own methodology, in which he shows up with a coarse outline that is explained to his cast and crew right before shooting individual scenes and then later shaped into something like a narrative—or not. The out-of-focus gimmick seems to mirror Seoung-mo’s own opaqueness toward those he’s working with, with the blur getting denser as the project refuses to coalesce in his mind. The real problem here isn’t the overall concept, which is kind of brilliant on paper (though probably never actually written down), but rather the endgame of having a protagonist-artist who isn’t mature enough creatively to operate as a real artist. Hong gets away with a lot in his films because he is a real artist, so depicting himself as someone who shows no aptitude for the game has limited thematic resonance and almost no real appeal to anyone but completists.  

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

In Water home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Jeonwonsa Film Co.