At the Sydney Film Festival - Happy family movies - WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2025) & MIRRORS NO. 3 (Christian Petzold, German, 2025)

Ha Song-guk, Kang So-yi, What Does That Nature Say To You

The last Hong Sang-soo film I saw was titled in water. Note no caps. The film was screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 2023 but I saw it last year at the Reflet Medicis cinema in Paris, along with a handful of others at a morning session. Hong has made over thirty features and I guess over the years I may have seen about half of them, most often as a result of Tony Rayns selecting them when he programmed the wonderful Dragons and Tigers section of the Vancouver Film Festival. 

In water is a film which requires some advance knowledge before sitting down to watch it. I didn’t have any of that advance knowledge beyond Hong’s name and thus it was that after watching it for maybe forty minutes I’d had enough and got up and left. If my French had been up to the task I would have complained to the management that the film was out of focus throughout. Close and medium shots had some clarity. Long shots were a blur. When I mentioned this to a Korean film aficionado later I was somewhat taken aback to be told that the out of focus visuals were in fact the director’s intention. Wikipedia filled in this lack of information when it advised that “Hong opted to shoot In Water mostly out of focus to reflect the main character’s creative block.” Right. How brilliant. That wasn't the explanation given by my Korean film aficionado but well...

The SFF program notes for Hong’s latest film What Does That Nature Say to You didn’t mention any similar such hurdles, describing the film as “the latest witty and incisive drama by Korean indie auteur Hong Sang Soo (in water, SFF 2023) Berlin Competition , 2025)” and “especially illuminating and rich in charming humour”. Not quite what I saw but interesting enough once you get over Hong’s slow boil of story line which leads to the fateful evening when a thirty-ish woman brings home her boyfriend of three years to finally meet her parents and the parents seemingly  effortlessly get him into a drunken shouting mood. It dissipates next day when he leaves and there is what a  critic might call an enigmatic ending involving a flat tyre.

Paula Beer, Mirrors No. 3

Christian Petzold has been a festival favourite for a decade and a half. He’s also big into enigma and never more so than in his Mirrors No.3. The program notes tell us something entirely unclear from the film itself. “Named for the third movement of a suite for solo piano composed by Maurice Ravel, Mirrors No.3 “(or as it appears on the screen, Miroirs No. 3, but wait for it) “is a beguiling exploration of loss, healing and how to confront the past to move forward, told in Petzold’s signature elegant style.” Analyse that. Actually I thought for a long stretch the film was somewhat Highsmithian – a chance introduction of two characters, one clings to the other and slowly we work out why the other is prepared to let this happen. Then in one outburst an unknown truth is revealed. But here no one gets murdered and some of the participants are happier than when the film began…and we have some musical elements to contend with. I assume, because I didn’t notice it in the credits, that the final piano recital  is the titular suite by Ravel…