After residing many years in the United States, actress Sang-ok returns to Korea to live with her sister. Her desire to leave the past behind, to live in the present (“perhaps this is paradise”) seems to guide her gestures and impact the reality of a world rediscovered, where she nonetheless feels a little like a foreigner. In Front of Your Face closely follows this fresh, familiar yet off-kilter view of things, now stripped of all their superfluity, in humble scenes of everyday life. The majesty of Sang-ok lies less in the secret she holds than in the delicate mixture of irony, bitterness and sincerity underpinning her search for a new approach to living life. The whole art of Hong Sang-soo is that, by having points of view interact, she conveys cinema’s ability to make this work visible. It is hardly surprising therefore that a filmmaker proposes Sang-ok a new film. AR
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