‘By the Stream’ Review: Hong Sangsoo’s Wry, Strangely Sweet Ode to Art, Love and Eel

“By the Stream,” the 32nd feature by Hong Sangsoo, opens as many of the previous 31 have, with a polite meeting between two softly acquainted people — neither strangers nor as familiar to each other as they might once have been. Tentative pleasantries are exchanged, before one says to the other, “You haven’t changed at all.” It’s a premature observation, of course: The ensuing action, such as it is, shows either how much has changed between the two, or how much they’ve forgotten along the way. Distinguished from other Hongs like it by its light autumnal chill and accompanying russet palette, this subtle comedy of actors, academics and dreams set to one side welcomes the director’s steadfast fans like a gentle but hesitant embrace.

Premiering in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, the prolific South Korean’s second feature of 2024 — following the Isabelle Huppert-starring Berlinale prizewinner “A Traveler’s Needs” — is likely to be the less widely seen of the two. Both are narratively muted and oblique even by the standards of a director for whom “muted and oblique” is very much a default setting, but “By the Stream” is more diffuse and elusive as a character study — too much so, probably, to win many arthouse converts. The director’s loyalists, however, will be delighted by the film’s breezy romantic streak and a brace of airy, nimble performances by Hong fixtures Kwon Haehyo and Kim Minhee, both playing characters quizzically in search of themselves.

It’s Sieon (Kwon), a formerly well-regarded actor turned bookstore owner, who observes to his niece Jeonim (Kim) that she hasn’t changed in that introductory scene. She can’t agree, claiming instead that her life has taken “a sudden swerve.” Nor can she even try to return the platitude. No clear explanation is given for Sieon’s career downturn — vague mentions are made of him criticizing others, and being “attacked” in turn — but he carries himself with the shuffling air of one who’s become used to keeping his head down. Jeonim, a solitary, diffident art teacher at a Seoul women’s university, has asked him a favor more suited to his former self: The university is holding its annual sketch play festival, and she wants him to write and direct her department’s submission.

In a fit of nostalgia — not just for his theater career, but for his youthful participation in a similar contest — Sieon agrees, though he’s a little put out to learn that he’s a backup choice, the original director having been dismissed after separately sleeping with three members of the cast. (It would be a stretch to describe this droll, low-stakes film as any kind of statement on cancel culture, but one can detect a sly metatextual allusion to the Korean tabloid scandal that greeted his affair with Kim — now his partner and production manager — several years ago.) Jeonim doesn’t have to worry about her uncle making the same faux pas: When she introduces him to her boss (and longtime Sieon fan) Jeong (Cho Yunhee), the mutual attraction is immediately apparent.

Cue a number of the boozy mealtime scenes that are Hong’s stock-in-trade, as Jeong invites Sieon for lunch at her favorite eel restaurant, followed by further, fluttery-eyed lunch and dinner dates, with Jeonim as an increasingly passive-aggressive third wheel. Few filmmakers can navigate the dynamics of a dining table quite so wittily, with the characters’ intimacies and hostilities mapped out in what they eat (does seafood porridge signify the beginning or the end of a flirtation?), how they eat it, and crucially, their choice of accompanying drink — which shifts from cautiously civil wine to tongue-loosening makgeolli. Amid all this gourmet wooing, the sketch becomes a decidedly secondary concern, while Jeonim — a loner given to idle drawing by the local stream and sleeping outside even in the brisk fall weather — retreats further into herself.

Even this description makes “By the Stream” sound plottier than it feels, as Hong’s storytelling is really measured in glances, pauses and, in a somewhat cosmic new flourish, phases of the moon. Sudden emotional spillages come at unexpected points, as in one oddly moving scene when Sieon asks his quartet of young amateur actresses what they want to become, prompting a range of earnest responses from “a person who loves truly” to “I’ll light the smallest lamp in the corner and protect it until I die.” This kind of tender sentimentality isn’t par for the course with Hong, a filmmaker whose essential feature template may be close to self-parody in its consistency, but allows for a fluid, ever-expanding spectrum of moods, feelings and foibles. Once again, the cinema of Hong Sangsoo hasn’t changed at all, except in the ways that it has.