Moving Forward in Circles Repetition and Reflection in Hong Sang-soo’s Grass

In a second-floor room, a young woman picks up her phone from a table and swipes at the screen, as though willing an expected text or call to arrive. She diverts her attention to the window, where she stands on tiptoes, craning her neck. Anticipation denied again, she tramps downstairs to sit on a bench outside, the camera staying fixed at the head of the stairwell, looking down through the window at the bottom.

Frustrated once more – though it is not at all clear what or whom she is waiting for – the woman strides inside and up the stairs again, pausing at the top to gaze in futility at the unseen phone, still resting on the table. She marches back down, then up again. And then again and again over a two-minute period, the camera fixed in position. She walks up and down, the tension in her body slowly easing, a skip entering her step, until her frustration is replaced by a carefree, playful attitude.

This scene, occurring slightly over halfway through South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s sixty-six-minute film Grass (2018), stands out as unusual, and not simply for the extended duration devoted to an apparently meaningless physical action. The woman herself, Ji-young (Kim Sae-byuk), appears in only two other scenes. Grass otherwise focuses on Areum (Kim Min-hee), a young woman who sits in the corner of a cafe and eavesdrops – and perhaps more – on the conversations of its other patrons.

The scene’s duration itself is not unusual; over the twenty-one other features Hong has made to date since his debut, The quintessential Hong scene has a camera planted in place to capture a static shot of his characters working through some interpersonal drama (usually romantic, often involving infidelity) in combative dialogue – often while seated at a table in a cafe, bar or restaurant, and frequently while getting progressively more drunk. The length of each shot enhances the tension, usually comic, sometimes tragic, developed in the conversation (Hong’s an exquisite observer of the foibles of speech). Conversation, in fact, defines the majority of Grass, which unfolds as a series of encounters between six ‘couples’ – men and women – whom Areum alternately observes and engages with.