It
is small café, but it is good for writing. You can always find a table and the
owner doesn’t mind if you bring in your own soju to get hammered with. However,
you still have to step outside to smoke, because that is the law, even in South
Korea. These are all important considerations for Hong Sang-soo characters. We
will listen in along with an eave-dropping woman as they wrestle with their
neuroses and disappointments in Hong’s Grass,
which opens this Friday in New York.
Areum
types away as various pairings of characters confront each other. In previous
Hong films, he probably would have openly invited viewers to question whether
these characters are figments of her literary imagination or if she is merely
recording what she overhears. However, this is the post-scandal Hong, who is
now apparently less considered with narrative gamesmanship, so he only occasionally
hints at such postmodern mischief-making this time around. Instead, he is more
concerned with the crystallized essences of their respective angsts and anxieties.
One
couple laments the presumptive suicide of a mutual friend, for whom they both feel
some measure of guilt and responsibility. A self-destructive actor rather
directly propositions a former lover to become his sole “sugar-daughter” means
of support, but his pitiful state is not exactly a turn-on for her. Meanwhile,
a younger actor-screenwriter is also trying to extract some dramatic truth from
real-life for his latest script, but he is more direct and honest about his
exploitative intentions than Areum, if that is indeed what she is doing.
At
just sixty-six minutes, Grass (reportedly,
the title does not really mean anything) is definitely a shorty from Hong, but it
still provides sufficient time for the characters to get good and drunk on
soju. He also manages to burrow quite deeply into their psyches. It is almost
like a Hong Sang-soo lightning round, in which he tries to introduce each
character and establish the source of their psychological hang-ups with the
greatest possible economy.
While
these are familiar themes for Hong, it is rather fascinating to watch his muse
Kim Min-hee playing something like his analog as the voyeuristic Areum. She also
has the sort of churlish jealousy we would expect from Hong’s shallow make
characters when she is confronted with the happiness of her younger brother and
his fiancée. Likewise, Jung Jin-young is slyly charming as Kyung-soo the
actor-screenwriter, who sort of represents the more confident and defiantly
indulgent side of Hong’s persona.
Despite
all the emotional baggage of its clientele, the Grass café looks like a wonderfully inviting place for some coffee
and people-watching. It is a small Hong film, even by his talky, light-weight
standards, but it has its merits. In fact, it might be one of the better films
of his less playful, post-Yourself and Yours, inspired-by-scandalous-real-life-events period. Recommended for Hong’s
admirers and patrons of sharply observed psychological drama, Grass opens this Friday (4/19) in New
York, at the Metrograph.
