“What Does That Nature Say to You”: Don’t Meet the Parents

Filmmakers similar to telephone themselves storytellers for the aforesaid crushed that politicians similar to telephone themselves nationalist servants: it’s a amusement of deference toward a fashionable ideal. Yet fewer of them dainty stories arsenic their cardinal portion of creation. One who does truthful is the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, whose communicative imaginativeness is truthful fertile that “prolific” mightiness arsenic good beryllium portion of his name. He has developed a strategy of low-budget and D.I.Y. accumulation that enables him to marque galore movies quickly. Moreover, the films that person emerged—twenty-five features since 2010—suggest that his casual observations are instantly crystallized not successful the signifier of images oregon characters, moods oregon adjacent ideas, but arsenic full-blown dramas. His latest release, “What Does That Nature Say to You,” which screened successful past year’s New York Film Festival and is opening February 27th, is the fictional synthesis of a car, a house, and a bottle. It’s besides 1 of the fewer movies of his that, were it transcribed and handed implicit to a mediocre director, would inactive carnivore the aforesaid spark of life, adjacent if it wouldn’t likewise drawback affectional and aesthetic fire.

Here, the creation location meets the Fockers, albeit with an aerial of enigma and contented that, from the start, sets it isolated from simpler oregon much blatant approaches to the subject. A youngish mates is parked astatine a roadside successful agrarian South Korea, adjacent a stream and facing immoderate mountains: Kim Junhee (Kang Soyi) is returning location to sojourn her parents. Her boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), whom they person ne'er met, has driven her determination and is dropping her off. He admires the family’s house, perched precocious connected a mountainside, initially from afar, and she invites him to travel up and spot it. The resulting encounters with her family—her father, Kim Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo); her mother, Choi Sunhee (Cho Yunhee); and her sister, Kim Neunghee (Park Miso)—are the catalysts of revelations that beryllium consequential for the mates and the household alike.

Hong’s method is akin to drypoint: a benignant of Impressionism of spontaneity, intricacy, and solidity, successful which the accelerated motion gains successful value arsenic it’s extended successful time. He relies connected copious, blunt, expressive, and philosophically reflective dialog that is nevertheless wholly successful keeping with the personalities of the speakers and with the contiguous logic of the action. Like each melodramatists, Hong deals successful coincidence and magnifies casual connections and insignificant accidents into life-shaking events. Without restraining his characters’ relentless guardant question with exposition, helium finds them burdened by their past and revealing it successful little but incendiary flashes astatine unguarded moments of conversation. As ever successful Hong’s movies, 1 of the cardinal looseners of specified speech is alcohol—which, here, takes connected a peculiarly gendered role, arsenic Oryeong, rapidly bonding with Donghwa by admiring the oddity and quality of the younger man’s thirty-year-old car, breaks retired a vessel of makgeolli and past another—and then, astatine dinner, serves him immoderate good whiskey.

The men’s admiration is mutual: Donghwa is struck by the quality of the household location and is amazed erstwhile Junhee tells him that her begetter designed it himself. He did so, she adds, for his mother, to whom helium was profoundly devoted. Oryeong did adjacent much for her, it turns out—he landscaped the mountainside for her pleasance and comfortableness during her last illness. Donghwa—who’s revealed to beryllium thirty-five—rhapsodizes astir Oryeong’s devotion, and filial piety implicit all, though (and, perhaps, because) his ain household bonds are strained. Donghwa’s begetter is affluent and famous, acquainted to Junhee’s household arsenic Attorney Ha. Junhee’s sister says she’s definite that this “huge halo effect” indispensable marque Donghwa look each the amended to her parents. Yet Donghwa, a poet, has a frayed narration with him and prefers to support fiscal independence, though it means making a meagre surviving arsenic a part-time wedding videographer. He devotes astir of his clip to his writing, with small to amusement for it but immoderate publications successful tiny magazines. His enthusiasm for poesy is shared by Junhee’s mother, Sunhee, who besides writes, successful her spare time, and has besides published a bit. The uneasy overlap of enthusiasms and concerns, the grinding mesh of creation and money, the diverging varieties of work and independency output a volatile melodramatic premix that’s enactment nether ever-greater unit by a literal confinement successful what turns retired to beryllium an apocalyptic dinner, a expansive conflagration implicit the people of 20 minutes that is simply a acceptable portion for the ages.