In Another Country

a film by Hong Sangsoo
2012, 89 minutes

Poster

Synopsis

A comedy of behaviors and a study in variations, Hong Sangsoo’s first film with Isabelle Huppert ranks among his breeziest and most mindbending endeavors. Huppert embodies three subtly distinct versions of a French woman named Anne adrift in a small seaside town in Korea, each invented by a young screenwriter penning a script to avoid an unknown familial crisis. In each of her doppelgänger guises, Huppert encounters a recurring cast of characters — a horny lifeguard who lives in a tent (Yu Junsang), her Korean filmmaker lover (Moon Sungkeun), a man (Kwon Haeyo) and his pregnant wife (Moon Sori)—wanders through a familiar constellation of locales, and gets entangled in similar fish-out-of-water miscommunications, borderline slapstick episodes, and bumbling love affairs. But with each go-around, uncanny differences and strange echoes start to accumulate. A powerful meeting of Hong and Huppert’s joint surrealist-comic sensibilities, In Another Country inaugurated one of the most fruitful actor-director collaborations in contemporary cinema.