Japanese teacher Mori (Kase Ryo) travels to Seoul to reunite with Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), a woman with whom he fell in love some years ago. He plans to propose marriage, but Kwon is nowhere to be found. While waiting for her to return, he befriends the owner of a local guest house (Youn Yuh-jung) and her adult nephew (Kim Eui-sung) and shares a brief romantic tryst with café owner Young-sun (Moon So-ri).

Hill of Freedom is a modest and elegant character drama with one key innovation. Its story is framed by Kwon coming home to find a stack of letters from Mori, written while he fruitlessly waited for her to arrive. While walking down a flight of stairs she drops them, and the undated letters fall all over the place. While gathering them up, Kwon inevitably gets them all in a random sequence. Mori’s account of his stay in quiet Seoul suburb Bukchon is thus related to the viewer out of chronological order.

It is a narrative technique that allows writer-director Hong Sang-soo to arrange his narrative in an interesting fashion. Rather than focus on the events of Mori’s stay, he can focus on the individual characters. Scenes are arranged together in a way that creates questions in the mind of the viewer, and then Hong can answer them when it is most suitable to the characters to do so. It transforms what could be a rather moribund exercise into something much more effective and interesting.

As seems to be the case with Hong’s films – this is the third one I have seen – Hill of Freedom is dominated by conversation and interpersonal encounters. Mori does not speak Korean, and the residents he encounters do not speak Japanese, and thus the majority of scenes are delivered in an awkward and somewhat stilted English. It makes communication, or at least the struggle to communicate, a central theme in the film. On one level it works remarkably well. On another, it makes some scenes feel rather lifeless. A lot of weight is put on the actors to bring these scenes to life, and some manage better than others. Kase Ryo is very effective, and manages to make an appealing character out of a somewhat morally compromised one on the page. Moon So-ri also makes a strong impression as Young-son.

There is a slightly sexist edge to the film, which seems to creep into Hong Sang-soo’s work more generally. It is often subtle, but as the film goes on it tends to represent men as sensible and stable, and women as emotional and childish. It goes hand-in-hand with the regularly stereotypical and banal conversation he writes for his characters. I struggle with his work: he presents an odd contrast in many ways, taking unnecessarily dull situations and plots, and instilling them with unexpected and smart wrinkles and textures. Ultimately one needs to accept the presence of one to appreciate the cleverness of the other, but it can sometimes feel like a real trial. There is clearly something working well here, because for all my frustrations I keep returning to sample his films.