“By the Stream,” the 32^nd feature in nearly as many years from South Korean neorealist Hong Sangsoo, opens with a quaint meeting of two friends, shot at an unobtrusive distance. But the scene’s simplicity — typical of Hong’s dramatic approach — is steadily complicated over the film’s uncharacteristically long 111-minute runtime. The story features many of Hong’s hallmarks — strained relationships, the nexus of art and nostalgia and the effects of libations on Korean social dynamics — and finds him continuing to wrestle with his own image in the public eye, as many of his recent movies have. However, “By the Stream” also marks a departure by inverting the perspective from which he explores the thorny subject of his own notoriety. 

The story continues his gradual on-screen reckoning with a scandal that rocked the Korean film world in 2016 — an industry where affairs are seldom public knowledge — when Hong, who was married at the time, was revealed to be in a relationship with actress and eventual muse Kim Minhee. Barely a year removed from the Seoul government decriminalizing adultery — a decision some detractors claimed would “spark a surge in debauchery” — their relationship became a political lightning rod, worsening the backlash they faced. 

Hong and Kim’s artistic partnership has mirrored their real lives ever since their first collaboration, 2015’s “Right Then, Wrong Now,” in which Kim’s character falls for an arthouse filmmaker. Ever since their affair became public, Hong has been the only director willing to work with the disgraced actress, and several of Hong’s movies both before and since have played like tacit confessions of infidelity. The most explicit of these was 2017’s “On the Beach at Night Alone,” which saw Kim playing a blacklisted actress in the wake of an affair with an older, married film director played by Kwon Haehyo (who co-stars with Kim in “By the Stream”). 

Hong’s latest release similarly touches on creators made persona non grata by various scandals, but it subverts the confessional nature of his recent work. The narrative — straightforward tale of university students putting on a stage play — smuggles an inside-out analysis of Hong and Kim’s public controversy in the form of dramatic introspection. It isn’t primarily about artists whose impropriety makes them outcasts, but rather, about the people in their vicinity, upon whom such affairs might ricochet. 

Kim plays Jeonim, a painter and lecturer at a women’s university, while Kwon plays her estranged uncle Chu Sieon, an actor forced into a life of isolation after an unspecified controversy. The two haven’t seen each other in years, but Jeonim seeks Sieon’s help directing a short skit starring four of her students, since the original male director was forced out after his improper relationships with several of the play’s participants were exposed. Although it unfolds far from the glitz and glamour of Hallyuwood, the shadow of Kim and Hong’s affair looms large. Only this time, Kim plays a protagonist who not only observes the film’s various scandals, but is caught in their blast radius.

Through casual dialogue exchanges — usually over soju, as is Hong’s M.O. — the details of each scenario come to light. As Jeonim is pulled gradually into the orbit of controversies in which she wants no part, she doesn’t have much choice, especially when her boss and mentor Professor Jeong (Cho Yun-hee) begins spending more time with her uncle. The two begin to grow close, rendering Jeonim a third wheel in a professionally and personally awkward position, as though Hong and Kim were turning the lens on themselves, in an effort to atone for the many lives their affair might have complicated.

Hong’s concern throughout “By the Stream” is the emotional detritus left by selfish desire and careless yearning. All the while, Kim’s conception of Jeonim is that of a reserved middle-aged woman who seldom feels at ease dealing with messy feelings (those of other people, or even her own), a dramatic tightrope-walk that landed her the Best Actress award at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. Hers is just one of several remarkable performances in “By the Stream” that follows Hong’s usual template of languid chatter filmed in lengthy, static master shots, which acclimate the audience to the characters and their environments. The eponymous stream, for instance, is where Jeonim seeks inspiration for her paintings, just as her volatile demeanor is informed by the tributary-like flow of her conversations that wind around unexpected bends.

Whether or not this is the last time Hong touches on his real-life scandal remains to be seen. If his next film is any indication — the charming meet-the-parents drama “What Does That Nature Say to You,” which premiered at Berlin in February — “By the Stream” functions as an emotional exorcism in which Hong, and by proxy Kim, purge not only their artistic egos, but the anxieties of public victimhood that have informed their work.

As the duo welcomes their first child together, they appear ready to put the scandal — and their confessional, guilt-ridden mode of filmmaking — behind them in “By the Stream.” Not by ignoring or excusing their public controversy, but by confronting its ripple effects head-on, allowing them the clarity to look to new creative horizons.

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