En otro país

I'm liking this movie more and more as I've had a chance to think about the poetry of it. Hong Sang-Soo has done something beautiful and lasting with In Another Country. Of course, having Isabelle Huppert as the star doesn't hurt.

Huppert embodies three different women named Ann, in three separate short stories. It all takes place in the sleepy beach town of Mohang. The supporting characters are mostly the same. But the circumstances change, sometimes only slightly. English is mostly spoken.

In the first story Ann is a French director staying a couple days with a Korean director friend and his pregnant wife.

In the second story Ann (wife of a businessman in Seoul) escapes to the beach town to have a tryst with as well-known Korean director.

In the third story Ann is taken to Mohang by her Korean professor woman friend to help her get over her husband leaving her for another woman, a Korean!

Other than the back-stories, not a whole lot happens in terms of plot. But the scenes unfold naturally, and with tremendous grace that they are almost painful to watch because the subtleties are just so right on.

There's one scene in the final story, when Ann, her professor friend, the man and his pregnant wife are dining alfresco, drinking soju and eating bbq. The man is obviously very curious about this white horse. He sees that Ann can enjoy soju so he pours her more, but neglects the professor friend. And worse than that, he only clinks glasses with Ann. Both the professor and the wife notice this without revealing their ire. The moment is unbearably tense.

Hong and Huppert earnestly present three slices of what it means to be a foreigner that you don't need to be Korean, French, or American to feel that weight.

Unwittingly it is my very first film from the universally acclaimed South Korean auteur Sang-soo Hong, by virtue of Isabelle Huppert. But out of my heart, the film is frustratingly bland and ineptly flippant.

All the setting is exclusively in a remote beach and a family hotel near sea side. After an informal conversation between a pair of mother and daughter, Park Soo (Yoon) and Wonju (Jeong), about their familial dispute. Then Wonju starts to write three short stories for her script, each centers a French woman named Anne (Huppert), respectively as a female director, an adulteress and a divorcée (conveniently dressed in blue, red and green), and Wonju becomes the hotelier.

In each scenario, Anne is pursued by Korean men, for the blue Anne, her friend Jongsoo (Hyo) expresses his beyond-friend affection to her despite he is with his pregnant wife Kumhee (Moon); for the red Anne, she is on a tryst with the film director Munsoo (Mun), who is late for their rendezvous, subsequently she has illusions of whether or not Munsoo will ever arrive; for the green Anne, who is accompanied by her friend Park Soo, out of her wedlock because her husband deserts her for a Korean woman, she is seeking help from a monk (Youngoak) but also seduced by the lecherous Jongsoo.

Yet in each episode, Anne encounters an amiable lifeguard (Yu), and looks for a small lighthouse, they almost have the same dialog typically instigated between a foreign tourist and a local citizen, which is pleasant to watch for the first time, but a third time is not a charm. In one hand, one can greatly appreciate the sharp-witted execution of the in-your-face hostility hidden beneath the ostensible amicability thanks to the language barrier, on the other hand, most of the time, the film entraps itself into its own dilemma-tic loop, only skirts along the surface of the inter-cultural clash.

Huppert is criminally underused here, maybe she also took the advantage for a holiday here, the Korean cast is naturalistic at its best, Sang-soo Hong never give anything too demanding to perform, the film is a free-wheeling prose, it might fare better if it is projected as a screen background with its unobtrusive visual tenderness and lilted but minimal conversations while you can sip your afternoon tea with mini-cookies, but, it you want to carefully scrutinize its contents and its subtext with your full attention, it is an embarrassingly dreary one, and it seems Sang-soo Hong himself, did adopt a devil-may-care attitude long since its inception.

Isabelle Huppert is having a great time making movies, taking on any kind of oddity they push at her. It's a bit rough on her fans, who get stuck with items like this and CACTUS but I suppose you take the rough with the smooth.

A Korean girl facing a crisis sets down to write a script in which Huppert appears as "the French Woman." Now you can't complain about mis-casting. Complete with the sound of typing (thank you Twilight Zone) she puts our heroine into three different scenarios set in the so nice timber beach front home, where she encounters the same characters in different arrangements, looking for a light house, losing an umbrella and getting amorously involved with the men. Kind of precious.

The material is presented in sharp, subdued colour with minimal editing. It's not worth it's star's time or the viewer's.

Maybe the point of the three stories all featuring a French woman (Isabelle Huppert), a lifeguard (Yoo Jun-sang), and some others in a seaside town in Korea is to say that in matters of love, our lives are all just variations on a theme. There is a randomness to how we collide off of one another, but there are also patterns in what emerges, and an underlying commonality. Or maybe that was just me trying to find a connection in what Hong Sang-soo presented.

Regardless, the little cultural differences and communication problems that stem from being "in another country" are mirrored in the struggles between romantic partners, e.g. The jealousies, infidelities, and yearning for others. There are lots of powerful emotions here, but they are presented in a subdued manner, with a quiet humanity. It's a pleasant enough film, but the stories weren't all that gripping, feeling more like doodling than finished efforts to me. I certainly thought about them for awhile afterwards though, and maybe on another night I would have given it a higher rating.

Apparently am in the minority here, but this is my 10th Hong Sang-Soo film, and it actually rates in the top 5. As a coherent narrative, it definitely isn't the best. But as an art film that can be experienced that cleverly overlaps 3 stories while incorporating meta fiction elements, ironic repetition, and creatively blurring the line between fact and fiction, "In Another Country" excels. Purposely nonlinear with its storytelling, this is the sorta film one could rewatch to catch the double meanings, hidden messages, and "spot the differences" between the always talented Isabelle Huppert as Anne #A, #B, + #C, in their respective stories. Same name, same actress, different characters? Or are they?