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Korea · 2021
1h 6m
Director Hong Sang-soo
Starring Shin Seok-ho, Park Mi-so, Kim Young-ho, Ye Ji-won
Genre Drama
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A film is told in three parts: first, Youngho goes to see his father, who is tending to a famous patient. Then, he surprises his girlfriend in Berlin, where she studies fashion design. Finally, he goes to a seaside hotel to meet his mother. In each story, Youngho anticipates a meaningful conversation
Introduction initially feels like a smaller, quieter addition to the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Still, it proves to be another delicate and profound testament to how our lives can always be intertwined with those from our past, to the everyday human interactions, and especially to the honesty and wide-eyed possibility of youth.
The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.
Slight and discursive even by the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic standards, Introduction refuses to auto-correct for anyone who doesn’t already speak conversational Hong.
Introduction is a thick, tangled ball of yarn, compact but dense; like beloved Hong influence Bresson’s off-screen space, non-narrative information is ample and cosmic. But for all the deliberate choices and teasing ellipses, this is one of the director’s more meager works, appearing unfinished and misshapen rather than productively clipped at the edges.
This tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.
This is a ‘minor’ Hong compared to some of the sixteen films he has premiered since 2010 . . . But it’s still a delight, a wistful, smart, chamber piece that gently teases out questions about whether you can love someone without controlling them in some way, whether acting can be sincere or sincerity can be an act, and how much of our life in the present and future is conditioned by our life in the past (a lot, as it turns out – but we knew that already).
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Introduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Young-ho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.
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