Introduction (Inteurodeoksyeon)

 

Writer/director Hong Sang-soo

director on the set

INTRODUCTION (Inteurodeoksyeon)                     B                                                          South Korea  (66 mi)  2021  d: Hong Sang-soo

Just barely over one hour, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay when it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021, this film was shot just before the Covid pandemic, but shows no signs of masks or social distancing, but it does show an empty restaurant, with one reference wondering when the customers would be coming back, and another indicating people are too scared to go out, however it was shot with a streamed-down film crew of just a few people, with Hong assuming the duties of writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer/ and composer of the music, which are just brief guitar interludes at the end of each sequence, resulting in the shortest end credit sequence you are ever likely to see, as there is one page of what looks like hand-written Korean lettering, and that’s it, lasting about ten seconds.  Hong serves as his own cinematographer for the first time, which he repeats again later this same year with In Front of Your Face (Dangsin-eolgul-apeseo) (2021), which begins a pattern of two films per year for the next four years in a row.  Shot in black and white, a simple tale of young people on the edge of adulthood, told in three chapter headings, though only the first two are numerically marked, with hugs playing a significant role in each segment, where dramatic life changes occur between episodes, revealing various encounters with parents, friends, and parents’ friends.  Hong introduces us to an aimless young man, Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho), an actor who appeared briefly in The Woman Who Ran (Domangchin yeoja) (2020), which won Hong the Best Directing prize at Berlin, but here he is at the center of each episode, the youngest protagonist in a Hong film for more than a decade, as the story revolves around three different meetings with loved ones.  In the first, while asking his girlfriend Ju-won (Park Mi-so) to wait in a building across the street, he meets his father (Kim Young-ho), an herbalist/acupuncture doctor seen praying at the outset, apparently undergoing some personal crisis, though we never learn what prompted the divine outburst, but the meeting keeps getting delayed due to a surprise visit from a famous actor friend (Gi Ju-bong).  In the second he travels to Berlin to meet his fashion-student girlfriend Ju-won on a whim, and in the third he meets his mother (Cho Yun-hee) and that same acting friend while drinking soju in a café, accompanied by his own friend Shin Jeong-soo (Ha Seong-guk).  In each he anticipates an important conversation, but what’s interesting is how Young-ho continually gets sidelined in the story, overshadowed by the other characters.  Often compared to the dialogue-heavy films of Éric Rohmer, also paring his crew down to just three people when making Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986), Hong’s conversations are not nearly so intellectual, as Rohmer’s films are a reflection of the societal transformations of Europe in the 60’s or 70’s, while Hong draws from the contemporary mores of South Korea that continue to prevail.    

This is an artfully realized minimalist film shot on an extremely low budget, with tight schedules, using a system with the actors working from script pages that Hong writes earlier that same morning, allowing them the freedom to improvise, known for his signature long takes that appear simple, deep, and personal, where silences say more than words, yet the beauty of Hong’s films is that things are never as simple as they appear.  Compared to other films being released today, this is self-reflective cinema from one of the most original voices on the world stage, quiet and poetic, where just the changing tone of the voice, or a brief cigarette break, dramatically alters the emotional impact of the film.  As Young-ho sits in the waiting room, the nurse (Ye Ji-won) immediately recognizes him with a big hug, where apparently he had a crush on her when he was little, offering him an herb tonic as he flips through books and magazines.  The doctor receives a surprise visit from an old friend, a renowned theater actor (Gi Ju-bong), placing acupuncture needles on his back, but then leaves him alone, as the doctor wanders upstairs to take a nap, forgetting that the needles are still stuck in the man’s back.  Though his father apparently summoned him there, Young-ho is totally ignored, and ends up falling asleep in the waiting room, with a short interlude smoking a cigarette outside on the balcony as the snow begins to fall.  Not really about anything, this section alerts us to just how often our own expectations are never realized, perhaps due to some unknown circumstance that we know nothing about.  Each of the three sections unfolds exactly the same way, as a planned encounter is interrupted unexpectedly, or at least influenced by an impromptu circumstance.  The next section moves to Berlin, as Ju-won is moving there to study fashion design, accompanied by her mother (Seo Young-hwa), who introduces her to an artist friend living there who will allow her to stay temporarily, a bespectacled painter, Kim Min-hee, who questions the seriousness of her artistic motives.  Both Seo and Kim are Hong regulars, familiar sights in front of the camera, but it’s not really about them, as the focus is more on the younger generation and the ambivalence about their future, even remarking upon the formal speech that they typically ignore, but the incessant smoking is a habit passed down through generations.  When Young-ho arrives unexpectedly in Berlin, with plans to stay in Germany to study with her, it’s an uncomfortable reality jolt that feels more like stalking, like he’s too insecure to live without her, or allow her the freedom to be on her own, as they head over to Potsdamer Platz, standing next to the Landwehr Canal.  Making things even more uncomfortable, they don’t have any money, so when the conversation shifts to Young-ho’s wealthy father as a means of support, it adds an inter-generational level of discomfort in this clash of generations. 

Two years later, back in Korea, the shift is to a seaside town, where the water has a calming and cleansing effect, like a healing quality, as Young-ho and his cigarette-bumming best friend Shin simply breathe in the ocean air.  They are there to have lunch with Young-ho’s mother and her acting friend (Gi Ju-bong), who appeared in the first segment.  The older actor makes them promise not to get drunk, actually insisting upon it, but then pours them drink after drink, as things quickly escalate, with the young men turning away from the actor as they drink their soju, which is meant to communicate deference in the presence of elders, a practice not seen before in a Hong film.  Unbeknownst to us, Young-ho was inspired by the actor, apparently meeting up with him after such a long wait in his father’s office years ago, and has taken up the acting profession.  His mother invited them together to have her friend evaluate and help assess her son’s future in the business.  But Young-ho is having his own reservations, struggling with second thoughts about continuing, mentioning he struggles with kissing scenes, as they’re not authentic, also claiming his girlfriend is not comfortable with him in those situations, believing it is morally wrong.  Out of nowhere, the impassioned old actor starts berating the younger son, finding his position intolerable in the acting profession, as love is simply love, however it is conveyed, where it’s useless to discuss the morality of the act.  This drinking sequence brings the subject of morality front and center in a way none of Hong’s other films have, openly discussing just what it means, and whether it should matter to anyone else when discussing love, which is the filmmaker’s answer to all the lingering questions about his real-life relationship with the much younger actress Kim Min-hee, leaving his wife in the process, subjecting the couple to tabloid overkill, as it’s become a highly publicized national scandal.  The two young friends stagger outside afterwards, breathing in the sea air, as Young-ho has an apparition, indistinguishable from reality, something rare in Hong’s works that we only realize afterwards, bearing insight into the struggling relationship with Ju-won, but it’s a transition to Young-ho jumping into the sea, which is frigid cold, as people outside are wearing winter coats, with his friend helping him dry off afterwards, even offering a big hug for warmth.  Told in a rhythmic style, featuring young adult protagonists for a change, separate and apart from “the older generation,” struggling to define themselves in the shadow of parental expectation, where the convergence and imminent parting with their loved ones is a consistent theme, while the seaside locations were shot in Gangneung, a coastal city in Gangwon Province, renowned for its expansive, chilly winter beaches, such as Gyeongpo Beach and Anmok Beach, with the noise of street traffic contrasting with the incessant sounds of the ocean waves crashing.  Like one of Hong’s idols, Yasujirō Ozu and his films Early Summer (Bakushû) (1951), Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), and Floating Weeds (Ukigusa) (1959), the lyrical shots of the ocean help induce a feeling of transcendence.

Hong Sang-soo's 10 Favorite Films 

Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde)

 

Director Dominik Graf

FABIAN:  GOING TO THE DOGS (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde)         A                     Germany  (176 mi)  2021

Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.

Never was a shade
of any plant
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.

—Georg Friedrich Händel, Xerxes Largo, 1738, G F Handel – “Ombra Mai Fu”, Fritz Wunderlich, 1962 YouTube (3:06)

Dominik Graf was born in Munich and graduated from the Munich Film and TV Academy, and while he is associated with the best directors of modern German cinema, he is among the least known overseas, with only two of his more than fifty film projects ever released in the USA, his 2014 Friedrich Schiller biopic BELOVED SISTERS (2014) and this extraordinary film, as his success has largely come in the German television industry, where he is perhaps best known as a director of police procedurals.  An earlier project from members of the Berlin School, however, was shown on the festival circuit, as the talents of three of Germany’s most significant filmmakers, Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, were brought together in a TV mini-series, The Dreileben Trilogy, a trio of interlocking films, all taking place in the same location and linked by one event, the escape of a convicted murderer, with Graf directing the second episode, Don't Follow Me Around (Dreileben 2 – Komm mir nicht nach) (2011).  Now 71-years of age, this feels more like a magnum opus, a massive, formally creative three-hour adaptation of Erich Kästner’s semi-autobiographical, avant garde novel from 1931, Fabian: the Story of a Moralist, which was censored by his publisher, actually omitting a chapter, where it wasn’t until 2013 that it was finally published intact.  Described by Goebbels as decadent Asphalt literature, labeled degenerate art by the Nazis where it was banned and burned on Berlin’s Opernplatz in 1933, it remains an outstanding account of the times he lived in, underestimated in its importance when it was written, as it precisely anticipates what was to come, with Graf capturing the language of the novelist, but more importantly the images he conveyed, a kaleidoscope of that time, set primarily in Berlin during the Depression before the coming to power of the Nazis, where the ill-fated Weimar Republic is a backdrop.  Its epic scope and psychological detail recalls Fassbinder’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), a 14-part, fifteen-hour television mini-series based on Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel by the same name, with both films exploring the origins of Germany’s rising tide of fascism by placing the focus on a central character who is caught up in the changing times.  Fassbinder’s Franz Bieberkopf is an ordinary man who is certainly capable of becoming a Nazi, while Graf’s Jakob Fabian is an unemployed academic who aspires to become an author, a moralist in an increasingly amoral world, who ends up fighting for his very soul, but is steamrolled into submission by darker forces that surround and eventually suffocate him.  Somewhat reminiscent of Pietro Marcello’s intensely creative and vividly experimental literary adaptation of Jack London’s 2020 Top Ten List #1 Martin Eden made a year earlier, which similarly addresses the struggle for artistic recognition during a period of historical change in post-war Italy, where a writer determined to be completely free is eventually a prisoner of his own beliefs, unable to bring about social change or even live in an unjust world.  A heavily stylized aesthetic captures the manic energy and ill-fated romance at the center of this film, featuring exuberant staging, as images mixed with documentary material are wildly edited together, often resembling the exhilarating fast-action sequences of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE (2001), moving at a clipped pace to provide a sweeping view of Germany in transition.  Mixing Super 8 footage with digital, the remarkable cinematography by Hanno Lentz, a staple of Doris Dörrie films like Greetings from Fukushima (Grüsse aus Fukushima) (2016), offers plenty of twists and turns with constant tempo changes, displaying an aesthetic grittiness with a shaky handheld camera, crude zooms, slow motion, blurring, picture-in-picture collages, massive overexposure, jump cuts, axis jumps, lens flares, maps displayed, stills, and occasional black and white, with short archival inserts, while also utilizing split-screen techniques with parallel scenes evoking the visual experiments of expressionist cinema.  In an amazing opening scene, Graf takes us through a time portal of the underground Berlin Heidelberger Platz station, viewed initially in the present as passengers depart the train, but by the time the mobile camera makes its way up the stairs, with a glaring Nazi swastika seen on the wall, we find ourselves on the streets of Berlin in 1931, where the city has transformed itself in the blink of an eye.  As is often the case in contemporary German films, the picturesque, unrenovated Görlitz, Saxony, Germany can serve as old Berlin.

Kästner’s novel was adapted once before, by Wolf Gremm with FABIAN (1980), chosen by West Germany as their submission for Best Foreign Language film, but it didn’t make the final cut.  Immersed in literary complexities, written by Graf and Constantin Lieb, at the heart of the story is Jakob Fabian (Tom Schiller), a jaded yet altruistic chain-smoking loner with a doctorate in German studies living in a cheap rooming house, employed as a copywriter at an advertising agency promoting the sale of cigarettes, while wandering the streets of Weimar Berlin at night with his only friend Stephan Labude (Albrecht Schuch), having met during the war, the openly leftist, crisis-prone heir of neglectful parents, often seen wallowing in the depths of despair, who has spent the last five years writing a PhD dissertation on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, one of the great humanists in the Age of Enlightenment, a German playwright, philosopher, and the first dramaturg.  Most vivid here is a sense of purposelessness and intense restlessness, as Fabian holds a nihilistic view on love and life, having been traumatized by his experience as a soldier in World War I, which continues to haunt him even in his dreams.  After the defeat in 1918, Germany plunged into a malaise of economic and social turmoil, as people were left adrift, while dire economic circumstances contributed to a breakdown of structures, engendering vast social and cultural disintegration, and while this is one of Germany’s darkest periods, at the time no one realized how dark it would become.  Graf has created a highly atmospheric portrayal of a troubled city losing itself in the hedonistic quest for pleasure and sex, temporary fixes for the surrounding chaos that envelops them, where again and again Graf interjects quotes from the novel through both male and female narrative voiceovers.  As they visit nightclubs, brothels, and artsy avant garde establishments, they relish discussions on the condition of humanity, with Labude, who comes from a wealthy family, believing economic improvement will help the poverty that he sees all around them, while Fabian, a pacifist, argues that improvement will come only when individuals learn to think for themselves, take responsibility, and reconstruct themselves morally, where he wonders, “Does the world have a capacity for decency?”  Berlin and its streets and haunts are surrealistically portrayed, where voyeurism is part of the prototypical Weimar experience, painting a picture of unlimited decadence.  Overall, the feeling is one of sadness and loneliness as Fabian walks the streets, seeing the decay around him and the constant fights between communists and the police, realizing he lacks the ability to change the situation beyond expressing a hope for rationality, while Labude is arrested for his support of communism and holding rallies for dockworkers, but is quickly bailed out by his father.  Graf probes the hopelessness, intrigue, and degeneration of Weimar Berlin, where a feverish energy exists as if tomorrow may never come, making a lot of sharply incisive observations, where the frantic editing stitches together a frenzied underground nightclub scene that borders on the nightmarish and the bizarre, where a prevailing sense of order is hinted at by the growing numbers of brownshirts in the street, often seen protruding on the edge of the frame, or hauling off a patron in a restaurant, with Nazi symbols and posters attached to the city walls, like a premonition of what’s to come.  Here the present creeps in again and again, because the past is not fixed, but in constant motion, as many characters come and go.  Fabian describes himself as a passive observer, a dreamer seeking meaning who abhors the Nazis, and while he’d like to be as liberated as his friend, who throws himself into every fight, this thought also fills him with despair, especially after Labude’s outlook deteriorates when he learns that his bride-to-be has been unfaithful, sending him into an emotional tailspin, drinking himself into oblivion, eventually passing out on the bed, while in the late night hour of his room Fabian finds time to jot down poetic thoughts in his notebook, becoming a chronicler of the times. 

The same train carries us all                                                                                           And time passes as we go 

We peer out, we see, we saw                                                                                            The same train carries us all                                                                                             How far we’ll travel we do not know                                                                            One neighbor sleeps, another laments                                                                              A third talks unceasingly

“Stations came and went.                                                                                               Yet the train racing across the years                                                                                 At it’s goal will never be.”

Rather than a conventional narrative, this is more of a series of set pieces, episodes tied together by its protagonist Jacob Fabian (likely Kästner himself) and the city of Berlin, using historical recordings, newspaper clippings, photographs, and passages from Kästner's novel, where it could be viewed as a tale of the conflict between communism and fascism, though it’s perhaps best appreciated not for plot, or even character, but for the vital sense of time, place, and milieu it conveys, along with its timeless depictions of flawed human nature, navigating trauma and uncertainty in Berlin during the four-year period between the 1929 market crash and the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933.  Fabian meets a liberated and self-confident woman with designs on becoming an actress, the beautifully engaging Cornelia, Saskia Rosendahl from Kate Shortland’s Lore (2012) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) (2018), which also stars Tom Schilling.  Curiously, they, along with Albrecht Schuch, all come from East Germany, part of a younger generation that ideally embodies what has been described as an Eastern consciousness, the first generation that has grown up in a united Germany.  Setting his pessimistic attitude aside for a brief moment, Fabian falls in love, fueled by sexual euphoria, which is surprisingly tender and intimate, reigniting a sense of hope in his crumbling existence, where life seems to imprint itself on them, on their faces and bodies, on their movements, on their gazes, yet what remains is the longing, filled with sadness and euphoria.  But then he too falls victim to the great wave of layoffs, joining the massive ranks of the unemployed, Fabian - Going to the Dogs new clip official from Berlin Film ...  YouTube (1:34), and while he thinks this is temporary, it lingers well into the discomfort zone, plunging him back into depression, where his angst and shifting emotions mirror the shell-shock of his generation.  While their prospects appear doomed right from the outset, with Cornelia whispering in his ear that he is “infected by the misery of the world,” Graf captures a growing sense of desperation and existential despair, triggered by the sounds of gunshots, Fabian - Going to the Dogs new clip official from Berlin Film ... YouTube (2:38), which is even more exacerbated when Cornelia’s career as an actress takes off, largely due to the protection and sexual interest of her older boss, the wealthy film producer, Makart (Aljoscha Stadelmann), who corrupts her with money, an arrangement Fabian finds difficult to accept, as they face increasing despair in a world where Nazi ideology is becoming more mainstream.  There is a parallel to Makart in Irene Moll (Meret Becker), a prostitute with a perplexing arrangement with her husband, who wants to get to know Fabian better and insists he sign a contract where he will even pay for him to sleep with his wife, but Fabian refuses.  Later they run into each other again as she runs a men’s brothel for rich women, and when they meet for the last time it’s on a train, where she again offers him money to accompany her to Budapest or Prague or Vienna, but in each instance, unlike Cornelia, he refuses her offer.  The film is provocative and troubling as we meet hypocritical newspaper editors, prostitutes (male and female), naive activists, opportunists, politically enraged drunks shooting pistols, a detached father and absent mother, a depraved husband, a malignantly jealous academic, all in an atmosphere of abundant alcohol and hyper-charged sexuality, where the prevailing mood of catastrophe is represented by the catchphrase, “Life is a chance, death is a certainty.”  Despite the commonplace street violence taking place between the National Socialists and communists, creating a disruptive force of chaos everywhere you look, showing society on the brink of collapse, this epic romantic failure and doomed uncertainty is set against a background of fantastic innovation in the arts, as there is an unapologetic admiration, where it’s important to understand that the cinema of the Weimar Republic is still the foundation of German film history, like G.W. Pabst’s Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1928) or von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) (1930).  A character notes near the end, “The wrong people live, and the wrong people die,” where that everpresent fatalism is reminiscent of a very dark Sydney Pollack film from the late 60’s, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1969), which depicts a marathon Depression-era dance competition in which all the participants are never going to actually receive the promised prize.  It’s also interesting to point out the similarities between the novelist Kästner and Fabian himself, as both were born in Dresden, worked as an advertisement writer in Berlin, were pacifists, and shared a weakness for young actresses.  The essential takeaway from the film is the vitality in which it is told, as well as the tragedy and immediate urgency of a moment in history, literally immersing viewers in the same streets the author walked, with Graf making the past so tangible, so present, where parallels to the present are unmistakable, with a steadily advancing shift to the right, with the reemergence of fascism and ultra-right wing nationalism spreading across Europe, becoming a frightening parable of current contemporary history.