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Kim Ho-sun, one of the key directors of 1970s cinema, returned to the spotlight in the early 1990s with the sprawling period romantic epic Death Song, about the torrid affair between Korea's first professional soprano and a playwright during Korea's Japanese Colonial Era in the 1920s. Chang Mi-hee plays Yun Sim-deok, a Korean student studying singing in Tokyo, where she befriends a group of Korean male students preparing to tour the country with a play. Among them is the aloof playwright Kim Woo-jin (Kim Sung-min), the only member of the group not openly admiring her bountiful charms. Woo-jin eventually comes around to those charms, but since he is already married, this forces the pair down an illicit path. The pair also bond over their shared...

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There's a running joke—at least, I think it's a joke—that if you shoot part of your film in the French city of Cannes, you will automatically be selected by its film festival. Sneaky Hong Sang-soo, then, who quietly and quickly shot the short feature Claire’s Camera last year with Kim Min-hee, who was at the festival for The Handmaiden, and Isabelle Huppert, who was there with Elle. And now, this year in Cannes, here is the film. A nimble and thrifty filmmaker often directly inspired by the places he goes and the people he meets, Hong's wry and plaintive short story satirizes the film industry—raging unseen and unheard offscreen—while ennobling the magic of happenstance meetings and chance’s circuitous ironies.The film begins in a space possibly never seen in cinema: a temporary office in Cannes rented by a sales company to promote the film's they represent.