Considering how ubiquitous face masks were during the pandemic's early years, how strange that more movies don't reflect that reality. Were filmmakers afraid of normalizing masks or hoping they'd disappear or fearful a mask would date their movie. Well, their unaffected presence in Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film makes this one feel both more real and more historic; his choice to shoot in black and white only furthers that time capsule aspect. And so because of the masks, The Novelist's Film doesn't feel dated. It feels honest, artsy and archival, a moving counterpoint to the head-in-the-sand approach employed by nearly every other filmmaker. In other ways, however, this flick is typical Hong Sang-soo: The action is grounded in awkward reunions, this time between a writer (Lee Hye-yeong) and a bookstore-owning friend (Seo Younghwa) then that same writer and a movie director (Kwon Hae-hyo)then the writer and a poet (Gi Ju-bong) who used to be a drinking buddy.
The film gets most engrossing once the writer meets a famous actress (Kim Min-hee) but Hong also keeps us engaged by repeatedly throwing in a third character: a sign-language student (Park Mi-so); a visiting cousin (Ha Seong-guk); a non-speaking little girl (Kim Si-ha) who stares through a window. Everything's made fascinating by the masks, too. Remember when we wore them below our chins to talk? or when we couldn't decide whether to wear them? or when we were the only ones wearing them in our group? or when we wore gloves? As a snapshot of history, Hong gets these details right. Eventually, things gets pretty meta, thanks to the entrance of a famous actress (Kim Min-hee). But from start to finish, The Novelist's Film an effective reminder that feature films can reflect life without ever pretending to be documentaries.
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