By the Stream: Hong Sangsoo’s slippery drama gives way to profound sincerity

• Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film Festival

Even when working at his recent rate of two features per year, Hong Sangsoo still manages to surprise. By the Stream, his 32nd film, may feature many familiar faces from his stock cast of actors (his partner Kim Min-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee), and it may continue his focus on the intricacies of human connection via the medium of artists having drunken dinners – only absent from Hong’s toolkit are the repetitions seen in so many of his films, most recently A Traveller’s Need (2024) – but the Korean auteur has a fascinating way of wrongfooting his audience. Hong moves his films in unusual directions, punctuating them with moments of grace that become almost transcendent. 

At an art college, where a teacher (Kim) works and practices as a textile artist (her artworks, inspired by the local waterways, are only seen once by the audience, but are given thematic prominence by the film’s title), a festival of dramatic skits is being held. When the teacher’s student director abandons the project on bad terms, having dated three of the cast members, Kim calls on her estranged uncle (Kwon), a former actor, to help.   

While instructing his four untrained actors – whose skit is almost Hong-lite, centred around eating ramen and making smalltalk – he begins a flirtatious relationship with a professor (Cho). The story outline points towards a semi-autobiographical theme of director-actor relationships that never quite surfaces; in classic Hong style, the plot is too slippery, too prone to digressions and dead-ends, for that.  

Kim’s character often becomes an awkward third wheel during meals with Kwon and Cho, but she is never made to feel unwelcome, the three seeming content in the present moment. When called away from one meal to a meeting – whose outcome seems significant but is never referred to – she lingers under a tree with huge orange and yellow autumn leaves that have fallen into a heap. In one of the director’s quietly miraculous moments of grace, she picks up a leaf and fans it slowly, an almost-dance as the sparsely-used score plays. 

Filmed (as usual for Hong, who is here writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor and composer) in low-resolution video and with natural audio (only the soundtrack is non-diegetic, and even that sounds like it’s being played via a tinny speaker positioned just out of frame), By the Stream lacks the crispness of Walk Up’s (2022) silvery monochrome, or In Water’s (2023) impressionistic blur. But the stark black of the nighttime scenes does stand out, wonderfully obscuring the tableaux of one palpably awkward discussion. As in In Front of Your Face (2021), the beauty is in the performances. One memorable scene sees the four student actors, drunk on soju and beer, prompted by Kwon to improvise poetry in answer to the question “What kind of person do you want to become?”. Each is moved to tears by the others’ answers, and their own. From a filmmaker whose use of repetition can often inspire ironic detachment from his audience, it’s a moment of profound sincerity.