If I Fall from Grace

By the Stream (2024) - Hong Clocking at 111 minutes, Hong Sangsoo's new film, By the Stream, is perhaps the most busily plotted and the most sinewy among his recent output. It touches on many of Hong's preoccupations and reflexive filmmaking, along with the recent surge of the Korean feminist movement.

It concerns a disgraced actor, now a small bookstore owner Siyeon (Kwon Hyeho) in Kangwon province, being invited to stage a play in the year end festival in a women's university in Seoul, by his niece Jeonim (Kim Minhee) that he hadn't seen for years. It turns out that he is a last minute replacement, because the young director who was in charge of the production was dismissed because he slept with 3 of the cast members. The actor sees this opportunity as a kind of redeemable occasion which would rekindle his passion for art as he felt when he first started his career, which happens to be at the same university long ago.

Jeonim, in her early 40s, is living a quiet, uneventful life as a textile artist and working at the university. She is first seen sketching in her notebook by the steam in earth colored Fall attire. It was the university's department chair Jeong (Cho Yunhee) who gave her the job and trusted her and became a big sister figure in her life. It turns out Jeong is a big fan of Siyeon as an actor and really wanted to meet him. After a couple of drinking occasions and some grilled eels, the actor and Jeong get along swimmingly and that makes Jeonim a little uneasy and jealous. In the meantime, with new materials that Siyeon wrote, the 4-female play team rehearses their play under his guidance. The young women are eager and full of optimism in their expression of joy and outlook- the way only not-yet-jaded-by-life young people say and behave.

Jeonim confronts the young director (Ha Seongguk) who was let go, when he comes back into the university campus to talk to one of the girls he professed his love for. His remorseless behavior and demands to get his job back and his material being staged receives Jeonim's contempt and anger. Her reaction is almost feral.

When the young man makes a second appearance to propose to one of the girls, Siyeon steps in and has a talk with the young man. We don't get to see what's being said.

Hong leaves a lot of threads messy and untidy, unlike Jeonim's textile patterns with intricate designs. What really happened to Siyeon the actor? What made Jeonim content with her life? Why did their play receive poorly and why did the dean of the school want to talk to Siyeon? It Doesn't matter. Hong's characters interactions are delicious as always. It's a change of pace from his minimalist work with his last couple of outings, even the Isabelle Huppert starring A Traveler's Needs that came out this year as well.

Space Music

Little, Big and Far (2024) - Cohen The launching of the James Webb space telescope in 2021 changed the way we look at space. High up in space, it is able to detect the wavelength of many distant planets, stars and galaxies that the Hubble space telescope couldn't. The clear and astonishing images of the planets in the solar system are flooding in for the first time.

There was another awesome celestial development- the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Rosetta Mission put a lander probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, named after its two scientists who first detected it. It recorded a 24 minute video footage from the surface of the comet, later compiled as a grainy black and white two seconds gif which became the internet sensation. In it, we see the great jagged mountain cliffs with specks of space dust flying about like snow with the vastness of space in the background. These jaw dropping, fairly recent developments in space explorations and discoveries and the implications of finding the origins of our known universe were never properly contemplated in current culture, until now, with Jem Cohen's Little, Big and Far.

The film starts with an Austrian astronomer named Karl. He chronicles how he got into the field and discusses his love for jazz- the soundtrack for space. It is something to see the ESA probe Philae's footage of comet's surface gif on loop with Coltrane's Manifestation (from the album Cosmic Music) blasting in the background on the big screen. Karl has studied stars all his adult life, but at 70, he is at a crossroad: His consultant gig at the university is uncertain and his physicist wife is in Arizona, utterly devoted to her work and he feels they are growing apart.

For a while Little, Big and Far is a visual/aural correspondence between Karl and Sarah, a fellow astronomer, who reside in the US. Sarah's concern is with the ecological disasters in anthropocene era, that the environmental destructions caused by human activities are too vast and frequent - recently highlighted by the Eastern seaboard in the US being besieged by unnatural orange smoke blown from a large forest fire in Canada. Sarah tells a story about an abandoned New Jersey telescope steeped in local legend and folklore by way of her young, nonchalant and wise beyond his years PhD student. The title, Little, Big and Far refers to what Karl and his wife see as the core of their work and life. Our lives seem very small to the vastness of the known universe which is still expanding, in comparison.

Cohen, as with his Museum Hours (2012), makes a gentle inquiry to human connections while presenting it within the bigger picture- in this case, the universe. His unhurried docu-fiction hybrid, using real academics and scientists through interviews and anecdotes, is so seamlessly melded together, while accentuating his micro/macro world view.

After attending a conference in Greece, Karl takes a journey to a remote small Greek island in search of the darkest skies. He talks with the eccentric locals who has his own theories about our solar system and ancient methods to measure time. The big finale to the story, which Cohen has been brewing throughout the whole film, features the awe inspiring skies studded with stars as Karl sits atop of the highest point of the hill in a remote Greek island. Our mind wanders - the stardust, the infinite vastness of space, our human connections to each other which gives meaning to our existence. With the long shutter, Cohen captures all the glories of the universe. And it's magical.