AllMovie

With Tale of Cinema, Hong Sang-soo continues his examination of the stories we create, for and about ourselves, and their relation to the tales we encounter in our culture. In Hong's elegantly shot world, with its reflexively retold tales, it's never really possible to grasp the objective truth. Tale of Cinema, while it adds another cinematic flourish -- the zoom -- to Hong's palette, follows this pattern. At first, it seems that we are watching a typically dry, cynical, elliptical Hong film. There's even a narrative within the film, a melodramatic play which Sang-won (Lee Gi-woo) goes to see, and then later unwittingly emulates. But even those filmgoers who are acclimated to Hong's narrative and temporal play and expecting some kind of shift will likely be caught off guard when Hong makes the critical turnabout that he makes here, nearly imperceptibly taking us out of the fictional world of "cinema," represented by the first half of the film, and into "reality," with the same zoom shots, musical cues, and voice-over narration along with the same selfish, muddleheaded men, and put-upon but accommodating women that marked the film within a film. Tong-su's (Kim Sang-gyeong) inept efforts to connect with Yong-sil (Eom Ji-weon) and reenact the events from the film he's seen -- events which he believes have been stolen from his own life -- reach their comic apotheosis when the fed-up actress tells him, "I don't think you really understood the film." It's a fair assumption. Tale of Cinema is open to interpretation. True understanding may be elusive, but richly inventive and consistently fascinating filmmaking is there for the taking.