The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who began his career completing films at a relatively swift pace, has been on a real tear lately. Because of the vicissitudes of distribution, viewers in the United States who follow his work are catching up with it out of production order. “Yourself and Yours,” reviewed last week, was made in 2016, and this week’s “Hill of Freedom” in 2014.
Coincidentally, a jumbling of time is related to the content of the movies themselves. “Hill” is predicated on a particularly daring temporal arrangement.
It opens with a young woman, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), picking up a collection of letters at an office. She opens and begins to read them; the male voice-over is in English, presumably the only language this Korean woman shares with the writer, Mori (Ryo Kase), who is from Japan.
On the way out of the building she drops the letters. She hurries and picks up the pages, reassembling them in a random order (and leaving one of the pages behind). So the remainder of the movie recounts Mori’s adventures in random order.
He had come to Korea, and taken a room in a bed-and-breakfast, to find Kwon and propose marriage to her. But she’s nowhere to be found. Hanging out at a nearby coffee shop, whose name gives the movie its title, he develops a friendship with a woman there, and that evolves into a romance. He also hangs out with the blustery nephew of the woman who runs the B&B. None of these interactions keep him from growing ever more downhearted over his inability to reach Kwon.
The ingenuity of the movie’s structure is stimulating and delightful, but there’s one aspect of “Hill” that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad-sack men who populate the director’s other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff.
While something of an intellectual — he expounds to a couple of characters on the book that he’s carrying around, one about, yes, the nature of time — he’s almost stunningly passive in his personal exchanges. It’s a testament to Kase’s talent that he sells Mori’s defining trait so convincingly.
Have patience with him, though. The movie’s ostensibly mild twist ending has a lingering irony that wouldn’t register had the character been more assertive.
Hill of Freedom
Not rated. In Korean, Japanese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 6 minutes. Watch on virtual cinemas.
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