By the Stream
Directed by Hong Sangsoo
•
1h 51m
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 111 mins | 2024
In his 32nd feature, one of modern cinema's great artists achieves new modes of expression. Hong Sangsoo's "By the Stream" continues a career-long trend of making it look easy and achieving a-ha effects that never seemed possible, all couched in a seemingly simple story of creative process. Kim Min-hee, Hong’s great muse, stars as an art professor who employs her uncle to write and direct a play on her small countryside campus, only to find an undesirable romantic bond forming between him and her boss. But what could be an entire Hong narrative is not even half of what’s happening here. "By the Stream" is a film of constant discovery: the ugly is made beautiful, the inane turned profound, and questions of unease fully mined for psychological complexity. This is a film to ponder, and finally one to rejuvenate.
Up Next in Directed by Hong Sangsoo
-
Woman on the Beach
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 127 mins | 2006
Deploying another of Hong’s beguiling twice-told narratives, Woman on the Beach begins with the tale of a creatively blocked filmmaker and his affair with the girlfriend of his friend and sometime collaborator at a coastal resort, then follows the filmm... -
Hill of Freedom
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2014
The progress through a hopelessly shuffled stack of love letters inspires the a-chronological structure of Hong’s Hill of Freedom, which describes the terse long-distance relationship between a Korean woman and the Japanese man who has built an ardent rom... -
Hahaha
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings a wry sympathy to the ...
