MIFF Session #9: CLAIRE'S CAMERA

Min Hee is in Cannes for the film festival with her film distributor boss who fires her over a vague charge of dishonesty (no details are given). Min Hee reconstitutes herself after the shock and takes a passive aggressive selfie with her boss who reddens with confusion. A brief dialogue about mistakes at the beach between the boss, Nam, and the guest director So who admits that most of his errors have been made while drunk. So, at a cafe is engaged in conversation by a Parisian, Claire. They speak in halting English but establish that he is a director and she a teacher. Soon Claire Nam and So are having fun at lunch chatting about the pictures Claire is taking and how an image might change the photographer's perception of the subject. So notices a photo of Min Hee among the small stack that Claire hands out. You know that the reverse is going to happen and that links are going to be tightened and conversations are going to be gaining a lot of weight.

This festival's third Hong Sang Soo film is a delight, a showcase of awkwardness vs crucial realisation that happens through conversations in plain settings. The Korean characters talk to each other in their native tongue but all conversations between them and Claire are in English so careful that it sounds like they've learned it in a coma. The communication, however, is the same blend of jolting candour and coyness. Hong has used multi-lingual dialogue before and luxuriates in the extra comedic tension it brings to the table (and there are always lots of tables in these films). And when words fail against the stiffness of a first meeting the facial acting and body language take over (the dizzyingly funny first conversation between So and Claire which collapses into embarrassed smiles and eye-avoidance).

And it is always about the communication. And the communication always reveals the true wish and it always blurts out like an old saying or a platitude. We are left to piece the fragments we have received this way ourselves and the resulting sense that we have arrived at the starting point of a long elliptical course is both pleasant and strange. Radiant Jang Mi Hee as Min Hee and the industrially magnetic Isabelle Huppert as Claire hold the centre of a gang of actors familiar to any who have seen a few Hong films. They are welcome on the screen the way that players in rep are. And Hong is always welcome on any screen I watch.