“One of Hong’s more enigmatic and alluring works … The newness [here] is subtle and gently perplexing, but very satisfying indeed.”

Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Winner of the Silver Bear at the 2024 Berlinale, the third collaboration between Hong Sangsoo and Isabelle Huppert marks a high point in their creative partnership and yet another essential entry in the director’s origami-fashioned chronicles of existential life. Here, Huppert plays Iris, a wayfaring Frenchwoman adrift in Seoul, earning money tutoring French to strangers met through chance encounters. More captivated by her mystique, perhaps, than any promise of learning the language—she has zero teaching experience—Iris’s musically inclined students open themselves to the enigmatic foreigner over bottles of makgeolli (Korean rice wine), her drink of choice. Gradually, as Hong is wont to do, patterns start to emerge that extend beyond mere coincidence. Huppert beguiles in a carefully modulated performance calling for earnestness and aloofness, goofy seduction and not a little suspicion. The standard Hong players—excellent, especially Ha Seongguk as Iris’s smitten, much-younger roommate—round out the ensemble.

In English, French, and Korean with English subtitles

“Hong’s funniest film in years … [A] tonic: a film that passes through you like a breath of fresh air.”

Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage

“Isabelle Huppert proves she’s one of the great comic performers … One of Hong’s most outwardly funny films … A perceptive film about the performative coping strategies of a stranger in a strange land.”

David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Media
Note

In Another Country, the first collaboration between Hong and Huppert, also screens in this program cycle.