March 2, 2013 | French actress Isabelle Huppert isn’t only the star of In Another Country, she’s also the center of gravity for this playfully wispy yet oddly captivating doodle by South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo.
Huppert plays three different characters — each one a Frenchwoman named Anne — in three separate stories sequentially invented by a would-be screenwriter. The plot of each scenario is thin to the point of transparency — indeed, even the inventive screenwriter is more or less forgotten about as the movie progresses — but the versatile leading lady remains ineffably alluring as three strangers in a strange land.
The setting is a small Korean coastal resort town, very much out of season, where Huppert appears at first as a visiting filmmaker in search of locations, then as the illicit lover of a married filmmaker, and finally as a recent divorcee who’s seeking spiritual enlightenment, but settles for reckless inebriation.
In each episode, the outsider interacts — sometimes cheerily, sometimes awkwardly — with the same set of locals, most notably an aggressively friendly but English-challenged lifeguard (Yu Junsang) who appears eager to court each new iteration of Anne.
Nothing much happens in the sense of traditional dramatic conflict or resolution. In Another Country simply accumulates character-defining details in a methodical, even leisurely fashion, occasionally dwelling on an embarrassing moment — such as when a drunken Anne impulsively gets a tad too friendly with a pregnant woman’s husband — but more often simply drifting from incident to incident while nonjudgmentally noting that language isn’t the only thing separating the various Annes from the people around her.
It’s probably not a good idea to waste time on over-analyzing certain recurring elements — like the umbrella that is repeatedly misplaced — in search of deeper meaning. Rather, you’d do better to simply enjoy In Another Country as a lazy day at the beach in the company of amusing strangers.
