In Front of Your Face: a poignant evocation of everyday beauty

Eight scenes, set in seven locations over 24 hours, make up this 85-minute film by Korean director Hong Sangsoo. In Front of Your Face is his 26th feature; his 27th and 28th have already premiered since In Front’s Cannes debut last year. Hong works quickly, instinctively and improvisationally with a small, nimble crew; he is credited here as writer, director, producer, editor, director of photography and composer. His films are low-budget and low-key, and aim to present scenarios of everyday life with a purity and simplicity that higher production values and higher-stakes plot points might obscure.

Each Hong film is best considered not solely on its own terms but in the context of his ongoing project: a cumulative collection of sketches with recurrent themes, locations and character types, constituting a growing anthology. In Front of Your Face continues this endeavour, featuring two staples of Hongian filmmaking: a lengthy, drunken conversation (no soju this time, however) and two characters with experience in making cinema themselves. But there is something new and special about this film, namely Lee Hyeyoung, who in her first collaboration with Hong plays Sangok, a fiftysomething former actress who has returned to Seoul to visit both her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee) and a filmmaker, Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo). Almost omnipresent in the film – we only lose sight of her in brief moments when the camera lingers elsewhere at the end of scenes – Sangok travels from place to place, arranged meetings altered by chance encounters.

In Front of Your Face begins in Jeongok’s living room, where Sangok has been sleeping on the sofa. Soon after waking, she intones a mantra-like prayer, which we hear through voiceover: “Everything I see before me is grace. There is no tomorrow. No yesterday, no tomorrow. But this moment right now is paradise.” Her prayers recur throughout the film, illuminating her thought process and – for reasons that are revealed later in the film – giving Lee’s calm and cheerful expression added poignance.

During breakfast at a café and a stroll in a nearby park, the two sisters converse, revealing how little they know about each other’s lives. Jeongok has no idea where her sister lives, or what she does for money; Sangok is resentful that some of her transpacific letters have gone unanswered and blames this for their estrangement. But the frost always thaws, and the recurring image is of the sisters’ broad, warm smiles. Lee and Cho are masterful in their use of body language, making the way the characters interact seem like a kind of dance.

These scenes, like all the film’s scenes (and indeed all of Hong’s films), are shot from one vantage point, a zoom out from the centre beginning each scene and camera pans where necessary to refocus the action. Shot digitally in relatively low quality, the images are thoughtfully composed, if never beautiful; the high saturation gives the greenery in some scenes an unpleasant luridness. Colourful high-rises can be glimpsed through apartment windows; looming over the sisters’ conversations, they indicate how much the city has changed, throwing Sangok’s financial situation into sharp relief and – once Sangok declines Jeongok’s suggestion that she move into one of the high-rise flats – causing Jeongok’s resentment at her sister’s move to the US to bubble to the surface.

After taking leave of her sister, Sangok heads to her meeting with filmmaker Jaewon, who has requested an appointment. There is some awkward politeness about a last-minute change of venue, but a jump-cut propels the pair’s conversation forward. Jaewon wants Sangok to act in an upcoming project; Sangok declines. But the sudden presence of four empty liquor bottles suggests a newfound openness between the two.

This beautiful, lengthy scene (almost half of the film’s total runtime) plays out like a conversation between two sides of Hong Sangsoo’s personality. Jaewon is a clear stand-in for Hong the filmmaker – his work is described by Sangok as “like novels; short stories”, and Jaewon refers to his ability to shoot and edit his own films – whereas Sangok seems to represent Hong’s filmmaking ethos and ideals, at one point paraphrasing the film’s title by saying, “I believe heaven is hiding in front of our faces.” The beautiful can be found in the mundane, says Hong through Sangok, and never is that clearer than in the moments during this drunken encounter when Sangok clumsily plays the guitar. She’s rusty, and plucks gingerly at the strings, but her focus and sincerity make the tune’s roughness all the more beautiful.

► In Front of Your Face is in UK cinemas from tomorrow.