Jun 12th 2020

The Hill of Freedom

@ Facets

On view through Thursday, June 25th

https://www.facets.org/cinematheque/films/june2020/hill-of-freedom.php

Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a invigorating holiday in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase, Like Someone in Love), who has returned from Japan to propose to her. Mori, who worked with Kwon at a language school two years ago and once intended to marry her, returns to Seoul with the intention of reuniting, though she has severed all contact with him. Mori wrote to Kwon after he was unable to find her, his voiceover narration guiding us through the requisite drinking bouts, awkward social encounters and questionable life choices. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. However, when she begins to read them, there is the problem of trying to restore them in the order by which they were originally sent and we share her quirky predicament as well.

Alternately funny and poignant, The Hill of Freedom is a series of disordered scenes, representing the displacement felt by Mori, a familiar trope in Hong Sang-soo’s films which well known for their persistent exploration of failed personal relationships, in contemporary South Korea. His experiments in narration, minimalist aesthetic, and improvisational style, perceptively showcase The Hill of Freedom as another superb example of his inimical style, illustrating his themes of desire and duplicity told through comedic variations in tone and structure, replete with psychological fertility and complexity.

Directed by Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2014, 67 mins. In English, Korean and Japanese with English subtitles.

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