What does that nature say to you (Hong Sang-Soo, 2025)
My first Hong Sang-Soo and I’ll admit I wasn’t quite ready for it. Flitted in and out of consciousness. But having watched this I am a fan and I’ll be looking out for more.
Starts out pleasant, too cute even: a young poet drops in with his girlfriend at her house and is welcomed in by the father, sister and eventually mother all of whom appear only too eager to find a place for him in their lives. But there’s something amiss. Every moment is played out for a second too long. It’s as if the curious albeit casual conversations are a set up for these very halting silences. By the end it seems like those placid smiles were nothing but a trap to goad the young poet to unravel.
At the time I found this as an indictment of the self important artist, those snivelling snobs with no foot in the real world, whose suffering is purely internal and constructed. There is some of that here: the defining trait of the young poet is that he has cut himself off from his famous attorney father’s wealth and is looking to strike out on his own. Contrast the young poet here with the mother: a working-woman-poet. On the surface this is an old og shaking his fist in the air invoking Chekov, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams and the like all of whom held real jobs, the fact that they moved through the thick putrid air of real life only to later sweat it all out on the page.
But as I sit with this a bit longer, I sense that Hong Sang-Soo is just as kind as he is critical. There is something endearing about someone who is so lost, lost in the world, lost in their head and lost for words even but determined to make some sense of it all. I think Hong pities him, pities how the young poet is simply unequipped to understand himself; he pities that kid in him who’s hasn’t grown old enough to process it all but is young enough to confront pure feeling.
Ah, the whole affair is tragic but in this prosaic way.