Another puzzle-box of a movie, in which a French woman in sandals and a lime green cardigan, spends her days wandering around Seoul, teaching French with a method she devised herself, drinking makgeolli, flirting, paddling her feet in a pond, and eating bibimbap. A tourist, to be sure, but with a mysterious background. Nobody knows who she is, or why she’s in Korea, or how long she’s been here. She just exists here, now. She doesn’t speak Korean, and her students speak no French, so they communicate in a shared second language of English, awkward English. Hong lets these semi-conversations play out at length, in all their imprecision and frustration, in long single-takes, making literal the gaps between what they can and can’t say to one another. There’s no space for genuine connection, it seems, and all these conversations play as polite chatter to pass the time, to fill the silence. Perhaps that’s why she wants to teach French, to have a means of connecting to this foreign place she finds herself in. Maybe she just needs to make some money. This being Hong Sang-soo, nothing is ever clarified, and nor does it need to be. Things just happen, sometimes two or three times over, and life goes on. That’s what makes Hong’s cinema, at least this mode of it, so enchanting to me. The ambiguity of it all, the inscrutability, but worn lightly, never straining for significance. An interest in the mysteries and contradictions and beauty of life. If he wants to watch Isabelle Huppert waste some time by walking in circles on a rooftop then so be it.
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I found this short review, written on my flight home from the Berlin Film Festival in 2024, while tidying up my Google Drive this morning. I'd completely forgotten about it. It was part of a planned longer piece about the festival that year that I ended up abandoning for obvious reasons, and this was the only element of it that I finished. I've never really written much about Hong, one of my favourite filmmakers, so I'm happy to have another piece, however short, to add to the archive.