TEN green Bottles

A woman barely on the threshold of her elder years wakes up in her sister’s flat in Seoul, the camera slowly pulling away from her face before a matching motion takes in the cityscape outside the window. The mirroring camera movements create an immediate hyperreality that calls attention to the movie as a movie, something exacerbated when the woman begins idly clutching at her stomach in the way that characters in old films used to announce an impending health crisis with only a slight cough.

This scene opens , the 26th feature by South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (and only the second to receive theatrical distribution in the UK), and it provides a clear glimpse into the director’s deceptive simplicity. For the uninitiated, Hong’s films, on an individual basis and as an overriding body of work, are marked by an aesthetic minimalism dominated by unadorned