By the Stream review – burrows under your skin

There’s an anxiety-inducing, tickling timebomb aspect to watching Hong Sang-soo’s wonderful new film, By the Stream. He makes you wait and see who’s going to be the one to finally break down, freak out or embrace a latent violent streak and inflict their ire on the other characters. Ahh here we go, here comes the Hong trademark scene where everyone sits down and gets squiffy on beer and Soju chasers then starts to speak their mind. The imbibing of alcohol always nudges Hong’s characters closer to entertaining social faux pas, and to abruptly shatter the polite, congenial dynamic that has been cultivated heretofore.

Will it be the softly-spoken university art instructor Jeonim (Kim Min-hee) who’s starting to feel the early pangs of mid-life malaise? Or maybe it’s her estranged, semi-famous director uncle Chu Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo) who seems strangely insistent when it comes to helping Jeonim direct a performance piece with some of her (female) students after the previous (male) director was ejected in disgrace? Or will the enthusiastic Professor Jeong (Cho Yun hee) be the one to lose it, as she subtly fawns over Chu Sieon?

There are a few scenes of conflict and unease, mainly related to the departed student director who returns to the campus to make his case. Jeonim displays her forceful diplomatic skills when urging him to leave and never come back. And later, when a drunken Chu Sieon holds court at a dinner with his cohort of female performers, there’s a frisson of coiled melancholy in his attempts to hold their interest. Though this does eventually culminate in a beautiful moment of earnest confession.

Yet, in the main, this is the breeziest, most overtly congenial Hong film for a very long time. At its core, it is a celebration of the creative process, and more specifically, of artists following their impulses when it comes to idea generation and collaboration. There are aspects of Jacques Rivette in scenes of rehearsal and refinement, and these moments are coloured by an uncommon sense of joy and implicit trust. And it’s a film about making art that feels good in the moment, as the act itself can be as rewarding – and possibly even more so – than the delivery of that art to an audience.

The film rolls along in Hong’s typical long, static takes that are enlivened by a sudden zoom or jolt of the lens. The performers intone the dialogue with extended pauses between new sentences and their reactions to others. It’s a mode that emphasises an awkward naturalism that heightens the implicit drama in even the most mundane of conversations. Through his years of patient refinement, Hong has imbued utterly inconsequential verbal exchanges with a musical quality, where – like jazz – the silence is as important as the noise.