In Another Country

It is perverse to make the comparison, perhaps, but, in significant ways, Hong Sangsoo's "In Another Country" resembles a brighter, more cheerful version of Leos Carax' "Holy Motors". Both films are about the hegemony of fiction and the fact that existence is a patchwork of narratives, structured on banal and conventional film situations, a virtual reality stitched together from the leftovers of old movies and sitcoms. Truth, or, even, the concept of truth is nowhere to be found -- everything is invention. Sangsoo makes these points without the metaphysical (and literal) gloom suffusing "Holy Motors." "In Another Country" has no laborious huffing and puffing and is light, funny, and evanescent. At a bleak, deserted resort village, a place called Mahong, a mother and daughter are hiding-out from bill collectors. The women have somehow assumed a debt owed by an aunt and they are afraid that payment of this obligation will ruin them. (I assume that this Yakuza-styled frame-story, to which the movie never returns, is some sort of allegory about the state of South Korea's economy or film industry, but who knows?) To soothe her nerves, the twenty-something girl decides to write a screenplay. She produces three short tales, all reshuffling certain elements that would appeal to a nice, polite, well-brought-up Korean girl -- there is a handsome lifeguard, a mysterious and beautiful French woman, a jealous pregnant wife, and some Koreans on holilday. In the first narrative, the French woman (played in all episodes by Isabelle Huppert) is a film director. Everyone speaks English, but mostly very badly and there are a number of comical misunderstandings -- the Korean men all lust after the French visitor but she rebuffs them. It rains, there is a barbecue, the Frenchwoman looks unsuccessfully for a small lighthouse, and people get drunk on some local firewater called Soju. In the second episode, the Huppert plays a woman married to a Korean auto executive. She has come to Mahong on the bay of this cold, grey ocean for a liaison with her Korean film industry lover -- he seems to stand her up, and, if he arrives at all, it is very late. In her fantasy, the French woman slaps her boyfriend several times but acts as if this is some kind of automaton-like gesture. There is a barbecue, people get drunk on Soju, walk in the rain, the heroine visits a small, nondescript lighthouse and a zany lifeguard who offers an erotic alternative to the film-maker. In the third episode, the French visitor has been recently, and unhappily divorced from her Korean husband. She meets with a Buddhist monk to discuss her feelings, goes to a barbecue, gets drunk, walks in the rain and looks for a lighthouse, and, finally, makes love to the lifeguard in his little tent pitched outside the public toilets on the beach -- thus, it seems, realizing the Korean girl screenwriter's fantasy underlying all three stories. The film demonstrates that a mildly interesting plot can be constructed from six or seven elements that can, then, be reshuffled into different patterns. There are some continuities between the stories -- an umbrella hidden in one episode is found in a later story and a Soju bottle cast aside on the beach and, apparently, broken in the last episode almost cuts someone's feet in the first story. The film is pleasant, curiously funny, charming, and the merest of bagatelles. Cinema is not a mature art until a major film-maker can use a major international star to make something that is intentionally insignificant, a puzzle that aims to be merely amusing.