In Another Country
Hong Sang-soo
89 minutes
Korean and English language
English subtitles
Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country is a modest, lo-fi and totally open work of cinema made congenially with a small group of friends and collaborators in a short periods of time, asking nothing more than that the people on camera engage in interesting—and often unexpected—ways with their material. For this film, like all of Hong’s oeuvre, the pleasures come organically with this direct yet casual, almost intimate or private kind of interaction, a complicity between performers and the camera. They are open invitations.
After the more considered, poised and tender The Day He Arrives, this film seems spontaneous, looser and more wandering, taking on the form and feeling of its heroine's uneasy, limbo-like state. Opening with a framing device whose plot is never returned to, In Another Country is the visualization of a young female filmmaker's idle screenplay ideas, written while she herself is waiting in limbo at the small seaside town of Mohjang having run away with her mother from their debts. The ideas are all centered around a visiting female foreigner, played by Isabelle Huppert, who in each story finds herself in Mohjang and interacts with a mostly recurring cast of locals and fellow visitors. In the first story, she is a filmmaker who is being courted by a married Korean colleague; in the second, she is the one married and travels to Mohjang to wait for her Korean lover to arrive; and in the final story she is visiting the town to try to forget her failed marriage. Throughout, she navigates a series of very funny and very awkward semi-fluent conversations, not so much full of misunderstandings as askew communications filled with halting intentions and unexpected results.
Like all Hong heroes, Huppert's character is a social flaneur who, whether she knows it or not, searches for guidance in others, the world around her and ultimately in herself in order to find a response, an intentional act taken in conscious responsibility. This act tends to signal to them a new step or path in life.
— Daniel Kasman, 2012