REVIEWS


In Another Country Reviewed by Dan Fainaru


Echoes of the French New Wave resound through this cute, light-hearted three-part romantic romp, which reads like a series of vignettes inspired by the encounter of Isabelle Huppert and the people and landscapes of South Korea. Yet another loving tribute by Hong Sang-soo to


French cinema, somewhere between inconsequen- tial and flimsy but pleasant to watch all through, In Another Country (Da-Reun Na-Ra-E-Suh) will charm both film students and their tutors, who will feast on the exercises of cinema language the film offers and over-analyse the use of identical dra- matic ingredients in the three episodes that are much less separate than they pretend to be. The framing story — just an excuse to keep these


episodes together — has young film student Wonju (Jung) and her mother, Park-sook (Youn, the formi- dable older maid in Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid), hiding from their debtors in Mohang, a seaside town. The bored younger woman sets out to write a script whose plot will use the place they are staying in for the location, but eventually invents three variants, using the same basic idea in each of them. A French woman, Anne (Huppert, in three sup-


posedly unrelated, but very similar parts) comes to Mohang and each time encounters a different set of characters, mostly played by the same actors. She goes through three different experiences, which are actually not that unlike each other. The locations


COMPETITION


S Kor. 2012. 89mins Director/screenplay Hong Sang-soo Production company Jeonwonsa Film Producer Kim Kyoung-hee International sales Finecut, www.finecut.co.kr CinematographyPark Hong-yeol, Jee Yune-jeong Editor Hahm Sung-won Music Jeong Yong-jin Main cast Isabelle Huppert, Yu Jun-sang, Jung Yumi, Youn Yuh-jung, Moon Sori, Kwon Hye-hyo, Moon Sung-keun


and the characters’ faces do not change, and much of the dialogue remains the same as well. First, there is Anne the film-maker, visiting a


fellow Korean director Jung-soo (Kwon) and his very pregnant and jealous wife Kum-hee (Moon Sori, of Oasis fame). In the background, here as well as in the other two episodes, there are other characters, such as a dim but muscular lifeguard (Yu) whom Anne meets while strolling on the beach and looking — in all three episodes — for a mini-lighthouse. The second Anne is the wife of a rich French-


man who comes to the same guesthouse to meet her lover, a Korean film-maker, Mun-soo (Moon Sung-keun); and finally, there is Anne number three, who comes to Mohang with her university- lecturer friend, Park-soon (again, Youn), for some


peace and quiet after her husband has left for his young Korean secretary. Shot with the naturally sprightly approach of the


early French New Wave, moving briskly and cheer- fully while dispensing amusing wisecracks, Hong offers ironic portraits of the Korean male as a self- conscious, but not particularly competent, lecher who cannot help hitting on pretty foreigners when they come their way. The entire cast, with Huppert in her sunniest


disposition, seem to have a lot of fun with this series of stylish sketches that purport to show how the same dramatic bricks, if intelligently used, can serve to build different houses.


SCREEN SCORE ★★★ COMPETITION


Fr-Jap. 2012. 109mins Director/screenplay Abbas Kiarostami Production companies MK2, Eurospace International sales MK2, mk2pro.com Producers Marin Karmitz, Kenzo Horikoshi Cinematography Katsumi Yanagijima Editor Bahman Kiarostami Production designer Toshihiro Isomi Main cast Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Ryo Kase, Denden


Like Someone In Love By Lee Marshall


It must have bugged Iranian auteur Abbas Kiaros- tami that, with Certified Copy, he had strayed peril- ously close to making a commercial film. If so, he has set the record straight and saved his reputation as an abstruse, impenetrable arthouse director with this Japan-set follow-up, which was greeted with some bafflement at its Cannes Competition press screening. Admittedly, this reaction had much to do with the abrupt ending, which feels like a random cut in


n 12 Screen International at Cannes May 22, 2012


that a cut and change of angle reveals the speaker to be Akiko (Takanashi) who, it transpires, is working as a call girl for bar owner Hiroshi (Denden), though she is a university student by day. Hiroshi insists she should spend the night with a special client he wants her to meet; she tells him she has to meet her grandmother, who is in town for the day and keeps leaving messages on Akiko’s answerphone. Eventually agreeing to her boss’s demands,


Akiko arrives at the house of elderly sociology pro- fessor Takashi (Okuno). Every inch the old-fash- ioned gent, Takashi has prepared a romantic dinner for two in his bookish living room; but though she chats for a while, Akiko is more interested in getting into bed and getting the business over with — something that clearly embarrasses her grand- fatherly client, though it is left unclear whether he had sex in mind when he hired her. However, the exhausted Akiko soon falls asleep,


and the next day Takashi drives her to the university she attends, where she has a run-in with her jeal- ous, impulsive boyfriend Noriaki (Kase). Questions of identity and the way images and


the middle of a very long second act. For much of the rest of the film, Kiarostami intrigues us as he weaves a carefully framed, sometimes funny, some- times tender shaggy-dog story about (among other things) an encounter between an elderly Japanese professor and a young escort girl. Taking its title from an Ella Fitzgerald song,


which features as one of four tracks on the film’s jazz-based diegetic soundtrack, Like Someone In Love opens with a long, fixed-camera scene set in a bar somewhere, we guess, in urban Japan. Somebody is talking on the phone, apparently to her boyfriend, but it is not until well into the scene


self-images can block personal change are fore- shadowed in nods to some photo stickers Akiko left in city phone booths, and in a discussion about whether she resembles a woman in a copy of a famous Japanese painting that hangs on Takashi’s wall — a painting in which a parrot also appears. The more you delve into it, the more resonance


you find; the problem, however, is that Kiarostami fails to embed the film’s visual, aural and symbolic games in a narrative that satisfies on the level of story and character.


SCREEN SCORE ★★


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