In Another Country

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (dir. Sang-soo Hong) This is a thoroughly enjoyable low budget, Independent Korean film starring French super-star, Isabelle Huppert. The film is presented as a handful of separate vignettes about a French woman (all played by Huppert) who visits a small Korean seaside vacation village. The film advances the theme that innocent or friendly interactions between foreigners can often be misinterpreted as sexual advances. The film has a strange improvisational and almost surreal tone, yet cleverly manages to convey the feelings of strangeness that a woman alone might experience as a foreigner in another country. If you are a fan of Isabelle Huppert, this is a MUST SEE.

This isn't a film. Rather, it's a collection of rather uninteresting vignettes, all of them focused around an unpleasantly self-centred middle-aged Frenchwoman who happens to be visiting South Korea. Unfortunately, this means we're back in the world of low-budget filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo, whose previous films THE DAY HE ARRIVES and OKI'S MOVIE I've watched. I didn't like either of them, finding them pretentious, but this is even worse.

There's no story here whatsoever, just a trio of three short stories that are almost identical stylistically. Isabelle Huppert's protagonist is one of the most uninspiring I've seen in film, a woman who wanders around looking for self-gratification, boozing and smoking all the while. It becomes tiring after about five minutes. The characters she meets are equally self-absorbed, although the twist is that as she's foreign we have to put up with a ton of poorly-spoken English dialogue instead of the usual Korean language. Inevitably the shadows of sex, adultery, and alcoholism raise their head, but it's all so, well, pointless, I can't believe they bothered to make it.

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.

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?

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.