In Another Country

(3.5 STARS) A French Woman in a Korean Seaside Town
In a Korean movie "In Another Country" ("Da-reun na-ra-e-seo"), Isabelle Huppert ("The Piano Teacher") plays Anne - to be precise, three "Anne"s - a French woman in a sleepy seaside town of Mohang. Directed by Sang-soo Hong ("Turning Gate" "Night and Day"), the charming little film describes in a playful way how each of Anne's interactions with the locals including a cheerful lifeguard ends up with different results.

Isabelle Huppert plays a woman named Anne three times, first in blue shirt, then in red dress, and finally in green. The first Anne is an acclaimed film director, the second a woman having an affair with a film director, the third a recent divorcee. The three Annes go to the same places (she wants to see a lighthouse, a possible Virginia Woolf reference), encounter the same persons, and even hear the same words, but all in a different context.

In the film nothing big happens. "In Another Country" offers small surprises and delights in its details...

In Another Language
Luckily for us, Wonju (Jung Yumi), the young woman writing the script this movie is acting out, doesn't indulge in the writer's prerogative to command Isabelle Huppert's Anne to speak Korean, or the Korean actors to be able to speak to her in French. As is, In Another Country, has the off-centered affability (preceding crankiness) of people struggling to communicate in each other's not quite fluent second language (English), and it gives Hong Sang-soo's movie a crusty texture and a satirical élan that has the actors seemingly working off of their verbal sea legs. It's a wonder he didn't call it, In Another Language.
After a pithy preamble, Wonju begins working through her anxiety over her family's sudden indebtedness by writing this script of interlocking tales, circulating action, dialog and shots, with the same actors in different scenarios, using people from her life, including Isabelle Huppert (a French woman she saw at a festival) in three different roles. It...

This film is quite good
This was the best movie I saw in 2012, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It may help, if you watch the film, to like films in general, and be interested in them.

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