In Front of Your Face
SIFF Says: A melancholic but liberating drama from SIFF favorite Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach, Our Sunhi) about a middle-aged former actress (Lee Hye-young) with a big secret who returns to South Korea to make amends.
Stranger Says: The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, an art house and film festival celebrity, makes the same move over and over and over. It's always about a famous director/novelist/poet with an ego and desires that are not honorable, and a beautiful but vulnerable actress/painter/film student; and they always take place in a bar or cafe or near a cinema house or gallery or theater. But despite this repetition, which stretches all the way back to the beginning of this century's first decade, his films never fail to engage (and sometimes even enchant) us. The same can be said about In Front of Your Face, one of four films he completed throughout this pandemic. CHARLES MUDEDE