Goings-on at Cannes feel charmingly real
In Hong Sangsoo’s “Claire’s Camera,” Isabelle Huppert is a teacher from Paris visiting Cannes for the first time to attend the film festival, and she has a camera.
Not a movie camera, but an old-school Polaroid, with which she takes portraits of interesting people she meets along the way.
“Why do you take pictures?” she is asked.
“The only way to change things is to look at everything slowly,” Claire responds.
That is as good a sentence as any to describe the work of South Korea’s Hong, whose playful, low-budget films take their time, absorbing you into the real-time world of his characters. You feel the completeness of conversations, which are often filmed in a single take, as if you are standing alongside them.
Claire accidentally falls into the orbit of a group from a South Korean film company, beginning with Manhee (Kim Minhee), a young woman who has just been fired by her boss, the sales agent and producer Yanghye (Chang Mihee), an older woman who had been her mentor.
At first, she is confused, because she has been given no reason for the firing, other than she “has not been honest.” Instead of heading back to South Korea, she stays in Cannes, wandering aimlessly around the scenic seashores and hanging out in quiet cafes in the town itself (interestingly, there is never even a glimpse of the actual film festival).
It turns out the linchpin in this mess is So Wansoo ( Jung Jinyoung), a noted international art house director who apparently makes very Hong Sangsoo-like movies. He is an admitted alcoholic (“Ninetyfive percent of my mistakes were because of alcohol,” he says), and in a particular funk at Cannes because he has just turned 50. Back in Korea, he and Manhee slept together after a night of drinking; what Manhee didn’t know was that her mentor Yanghye has been quietly carrying on an affair with the director as well.
A lot of drama, right? Except that as always in Hong’s films, it plays out more as a comedy of manners, with Claire an ever-present guide.
As Yanghye notes, “maturity has nothing to do with making movies.”
Huppert, the legendary French actress, is appearing in her second Hong film (after 2012’s “In Another Country”). She might like appearing in his films because she displays such a free-spirited side of herself. She is delightful, and it is amusing that this giant of cinema plays the only main character in the film not in the movie business. (There is also a sly reference to one of her most notorious films, “The Piano Teacher.”)
At 69 minutes, “Claire’s Camera,” which opens exclusively in San Francisco at the 4-Star, is among Hong’s shortest movies. But it feels complete, just the right amount of time to spend part of a weekend at Cannes with some charmingly dysfunctional people.