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Yu Jun-Sang, who plays a lifeguard, and Isabelle Huppert in ‘‘In Another Country,’’ directed by Hong Sang-soo
The director Hong Sang-soo, who has been called the Rohmer of Korean cinema, turns out his enigmatic human comedies at high speed. Two years ago, he won the Certain Regard prize with “Hahaha.” His latest film, “In Another Country,” in competition here, is a step into another dimension.
For the first time, he has made a film in English and has gone outside his country to cast the French actress Isabelle Huppert in the lead role.
Ms. Huppert, who started acting as a teenager in the 1970s, has been many things to many directors. She won her first Best Actress award at Cannes for her role in Claude Chabrol’s “Violette Nozière” (1978). It happened before that she had two films at Cannes at once — and it is the case this year.
In Mr. Hong’s film, which will be screened on Sunday, she plays three different women named Anne. “I loved the adventurous aspect to making this movie,” the actress said. “And adventure is at the vital center of the story.”
She first met the Mr. Hong at the Paris Cinémathèque in March 2011 at a retrospective of his films. “I think the idea was already in his head, perhaps, the desire to work together. And then we met again in Seoul for a show of photos of my work.”
She said she let herself be transported by a project without a script and was delighted to play the game, traveling to a beach town, Mohang, South Korea, in a very rainy season.
“I don’t know all his films, but I think he always works the same way,” Ms. Huppert said. “He starts with the place, finds the people, and only then, writes the script. So it gives an enigmatic cast to everything — and to the way we work. He has a curious, atypical relationship to his film. He’s very exacting, and precise, and there are lots of takes, he’s not ever in a rush.”
The first Anne is a director, the second, a woman meeting her lover secretly, and the third, a woman on the rebound whose husband has run off with a Korean woman. The three meet up with one recurring character, a lifeguard played by Yu Jun-Sang. “Anne starts with him and ends up with him, on the beach.”
She sees her character as several versions of the same woman. “The first Anne meets a man who says they kissed and she can’t remember; she’s preoccupied, but in control,” Ms. Huppert said. “The second is dependant on her lover who doesn’t take good care of her. And the third is a bit abandoned by her family and looking for something mystic, perhaps.”
Ms. Huppert had e-mailed photos of herself to the director, suggesting costumes for the characters he described. “And each morning, he came into my room to choose outfits in poetic colors,” she said.
Asked whether Mr. Hong’s way of working reminded her of Jean-Luc Godard who had cast her as a prostitute in “Sauve qui peut (la vie)” (Every Man for Himself) (1980), she said that she didn’t like to make comparisons, “but yes, very much — the same manner of choosing costumes.”
Part of the Korean adventure was making the film in English. “They all spoke Korean, and English was the only language I could speak with them; this added to the strangeness, ” she said.
Ms. Huppert also spoke English in Brillante Mendoza’s “Captive,” made last year in the Philippines. “I adore working in foreign countries,” she said.
She went to Africa on a long shoot for the filming of Claire Denis’s “White Material,” (2009) and took her young son along. “But in Korea, I was really alone, and it felt good,” she said. “It was a very intimate shoot. He’s a director who likes to shoot close up. Only a few weeks of shooting, but he works both fast and slow, in the sense that there are a lot of takes. Each filmmaker has his own rhythm, yet I had the impression that he was very surefooted.
“He filmed me in profile or from the back, like a figure in the landscape. It rained a lot, and I read in my room for days. There was nothing to see, the beach, temples in the distance.”
Ms. Huppert, who won her second Best Actress award at Cannes in 2001 as a piano teacher in Michael Haneke’s “La Pianiste,” plays a small part in the director’s new movie, “Amour,” which also shows in competition on May 20.
“I am the daughter of the couple played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, but the film is really about the couple,” she said.
“With Michael I’m sometimes a mother sometimes a daughter: I was a mother in the ‘Le temps du loups,’ and a daughter in ‘The Pianist.’ In this film, I’m a very different pianist! A woman who wants everything to go fast and has parents who are living at another rhythm. ”
She is delighted that Mr. Hong is in competition. “He wants to compete with his different kind of music, and I love the way he filmed me, just like any other woman in the landscape.”
Source: nytimes
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Date: 2012-05-19 12:31 pm (UTC)True queen of french cinema right there. Also so much love between SK and France nowadays o__O. Did anyone saw the Kpop reportage on le Petit Journal yesterday? The stuff about Hollande was hilariously cute XD.
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Date: 2012-05-19 02:04 pm (UTC)I did, it was awesome!! I loved that girl who said he was sexy but she'd have to take another look at the picture once sober lol
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Date: 2012-05-19 08:05 pm (UTC)