Grass
The ridiculously prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is back with a typically subtle and playful drama – which takes place entirely in a Seoul cafe
All set around a café in a quiet backstreet in Seoul, the latest subtle, melancholic and playful dramedy from hyperprolific auteur Hong Sang-soo reveals its relationships oddly and surreally. A young woman types on a laptop, judging another couple sitting nearby. The couple argues about a friend of theirs who committed suicide. Later, an actor-screenwriter asks the laptop girl to be his muse, and is turned down flat. Drifting around, we also meet laptop girl’s brother and his girlfriend, and another washed-up actor, desperately asking an old girlfriend for a place to live.
What are they all doing here, who are they to each other, and what does it mean? Are they even real, or projections of the laptop girl’s imagination as she writes something between a diary and a short story? In Hong’s gorgeous little black-and-white table fable, it sort of becomes clear, and sort of doesn’t matter, as we get to know the tones of the players’ bittersweet emotions. Meanwhile, classical music plays on the radio from Schubert, Bach, Offenbach and Pachelbel; sometimes tender, sometimes epic.
“If not now, when should we drink?” asks one of the characters as they sneak a cheeky bottle of soju. This is a laid-back movie that goes deep, with the dialogue full of casually profound observations on human nature. “He looks hot-tempered, he must have a reason. Who doesn’t?”
Grass screened at the 68th Berlinale, which ends 25 Feb