MIFF Session #8: A Traveler's Needs

Iris teaches French to locals in Seoul where she has moved. Her method is to initially communicate in English, interrogate the student and write a series of observations (often waywardly different to the answers) in French on cards and give them a cassette with their conversation on it. The first two sequences show this in action and a third shows how she has established herself locally with a much younger man in his apartment.

Hong Sang-soo's deceptively light touch, allowing comedy through often strained conversation (here, between people who speak their second language, English) whereby characters reveal their depths to we witnesses through the screen. Hong's observation comedies keep the emotional content low (until it needs venting) and the conversational tone to the dining room or afternoon stroll level. Their charm is between the lines and under the voices. 

Here, the eternal Isabelle Huppert gives us an aging woman living by her wits and exploiting everyone she can in the nicest possible way. Her marks aren't unwitting, she does get challenged about the formality of the "training" and that it costs money and the man's mother almost rages about the inappropriateness of the arrangement he has with Iris. Where there is reconciliation between combatants it is always done with enlightened experience or at least a willing self-deception. Huppert plays this odd role with a breeziness that assumes her Frenchness will carry her and is happy to expose her own flaws with a disarming smile if not a gentle but profound evasion.

It can be hard trying to describe a Hong Sang-soo film and why they are so funny when they deal with things like conflict, contempt, scamming or deception and why the laughter should feel so light when it is so constant. I don't mean the indulgent titters of festival audiences with beloved circuit darlings but genuine mirth. I could go in and boil it in a test tube but the magic would go up with the steam.