La Voyageuse

Super typical Hong Sang-soo storyline. But this time, Director Hong turned the means into ends, and returned to the alienation and closeness between people. There are many factors, and language became a more core means to process and apply.

Huppert's appearance adds a layer of depiction of strangers to the film in addition to the discussion of people themselves, acting as a cultural intruder. Whether communication problems caused by language barriers can effectively reveal people's identity. Repetition and variation are Hong Sang-soo's tricks, but they are also our lives.

From this development, Director Hong still likes to express his feelings directly. Discuss this inevitable struggle for subjectivity. Director Hong's little humor still works, just take a look and watch it.

As usual, Hong Sang-soo provides a typical simple, dialogue-filled, and character exploration narrative on the concept of closeness within individuals, alienation, and conversations. Sang-soo always provide some art-house dramatic works that resembles the work for Eric Rohmer's in the modern generation and is filled with likable characters, solid performances, and dialogue that are most of the time, feeling of the lessons from a poetic novel or realistic conversations.

With the simple production, writing and direction, Sang-soo does drift away from some of the focus within the narrative but as a whole, it stands out as another solid work from Hong.

A dull movie with flat characters in which nothing relevant happens. A wasted opportunity to showcase the relationship between a foreigner and Korean culture. The script seems to have been virtually non existent during filming (if there was any script at all).

There was no way of connecting with the story or any of the characters, as they were all incredibly lifeless. An awkward nonsense.

In short, dialogue is nonsensical, camerawork is amateur at best, actors don't bother making any effort whatsoever. Don't waste your time watching this crap because it's over an hour of your life that you won't get back.

Unfortunately, the film loses its purpose. The story turns out to be much longer than necessary, losing itself along the way. The cinematography and editing seem to have lacked proper attention, and we experience a sense of awkwardness in certain scenes, with framing that feels worse than home videos. The most interesting aspect of the film is when Iris describes her idea of teaching and how she believes that emotionally connecting with a language can help us express ourselves in it. However, this idea is not well developed.

At first, it seems intriguing that she let her students to do as they please and explore those moments on their own (such as playing instruments), but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that she doesn't care as much as her dialogue initially suggests, making it shallow. It could have been amusing to compare the experiences of the two students and how emotions are so universal, but the text - identical down to every comma - comes across as sheer laziness in writing something different.

When we compare both students to Iris, we see that the latter breaks the "rule" by playing the flute in the park without any talent and without caring. However, I don't think we can say she feels happy doing so; her emotions are not well explored (except for the scene where she talks to her friend in the apartment). I believe the film tried to explore the concept of a life of simple pleasures, as seen in "Perfect Days", but it ended up falling into monotony and a lack of meaning.

This has to be the worst film I've seen in a long time. Story line looks and sounds like day one improvisation at a high school drama club. A long zoom into a dog has to be the Director mocking anyone who has been foolish enough to have spent their hard cash and time on this film. The actors must have wondered what the hell was going on, whilst making this awful drama. The colour and contrast was flat, don't know if this was a deliberate attempt to make this film even more boring. How this was ever financed I don't know. I would be embarrassed to put my name to this farce. Don't waste your time.