In Front of Your Face

A captivating film of deep emotional power; like weeds slowly cracking the pavement above, its movements in isolation are barely felt but its effects are profound.

The nothing much that unfurls over the following eighty or so minutes feels like everything.

This is another subtle jewel, wise and charming, insouciant yet measured, and somehow squaring the circle between the overwhelming sadness of lost time and the glint of eternity in a passing instant.

Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.

Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning. It will certainly appeal to his festival fan base but neophytes beware: It takes patience to get to hidden truths, and even so they are about as clear as a Zen koan.

In most other filmmaker’s hands, these seemingly inconsequential observations wouldn’t seamlessly create a tender and alluring narrative. Yet Hong Sang-soo seems to have it all down to a science.

The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.