[IN ANOTHER COUNTRY
screens Tuesday March 12th at 9:00 pm at the Capitol Theatre in
association with the Cleveladn Cinematheque.]
[IN ANOTHER COUNTRY screens Wednesday May 15th at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
I suppose you could call IN ANOTHER
COUNTRY an anthology film, but
it feels more like an artistic exercise. In a framing sequence, a
young Korean woman tries to take her mind off her family's financial
problems by writing short stories. Each story involves a French woman
named Anne (Isabelle Huppert) visiting South Korea. In each story,
there is some element of marital infidelity with Huppert being a
disinterested object of desire in the first segment, a cheating wife
in the second, and finally a woman whose husband has left her for a
Korean girl in the final tale. Jong-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) is alternately
a rebuffed suitor, the man Anne is cheating on, and then back again.
Yoo Jun-sang provides comic relief as a dim witted lifeguard in each
segment. Various plot points and lines of dialogue recur in each
story.
The
acting is first rate and the film is very well made. There is some
fine imagery, and as a fan of sixties and seventies cinema I can't
help but love the hard camera zooms. Still, IN ANOTHER
COUNTRY feels more than a bit
sterile and contrived. Taken as a whole, it's the kind of thing that
one can understand appealing to a filmmaker as a way of stretching
his or her talents, but as a work intended for public consumption I'm
not sure it really works. It certainly didn't do much for me. There
is a nice undercurrent of light humor, and no doubt some will find
the film interesting on an intellectual or artistic level. On any
kind of deeper emotional level, however, it fails to connect.
Writer/director Hong
Sangsoo
is clearly a
talented guy, but perhaps a little too self absorbed for his own
good. 2 1/2 out of 4 stars.
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