When a group of famous Asian directors turn to foreign countries to shoot non-native language films, the theme and script are the most critical, followed by the actors. After all, it is aimed at Western audiences and the market. The director knows that actors play a pivotal role in the success of the film, so it is more secure to find pop stars or big names in acting. Examples of the former are Norah Jones in Blueberry Nights, There are many examples of the "Coffee Time", not to mention the latter. In this batch of multinational works, French actress Juliette Binoche has the highest appearance rate so far, Abbas, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hirokazu Shire, Naomi Kawase... This long list of well-known authors and directors has successively presented She threw out an olive branch, enough to see her undisputed hallowed status in today's film industry. Next, this actress is also the favorite of many Asian directors. This acting queen is good at playing difficult roles, and her psychologically distorted and schizophrenic performances are not difficult for her. Unexpectedly, her first light-hearted sketch co-produced with Korean director Hong Changxiu suddenly changed the audience's impression of her previous heavy and depressing roles.
Isabelle Huppert has always been an actor admired by director Hong Changxiu, and they have collaborated on two films. In this first collaboration "In a Foreign Land", Director Hong tailored three roles for her with completely different identities and personalities, allowing her to play to the fullest in the play: a single French director, an affair with a married man There are not many actors left in today's film industry who can play three roles at the same time in the same movie, and Huppert is worthy of being a movie queen among movie queens. , the deduction of physical and mental relaxation produces a lot of hilarious comedy effects.
This seemingly arbitrary three-stage story actually hides the narrative context and tricks carefully designed by Director Hong Changxiu. The three stories are born from a novel written by a schoolgirl at the beginning of the film, and have a meta-film structure. The background all take place in an unknown seaside town in South Korea. Huppert plays three characters with the same name as Anna. Apart from her, other Korean actors also play different roles in the three stories. When the audience thinks that this is a story in three parallel time and space, the symbol that secretly connects the three stories emerges from time to time in the script. The most striking thing is the lighthouse. The three "Anna" all wanted to see the lighthouse, but they couldn't find it. Only the second "Anna" was seen in a dream. The two magical props, the broken wine bottle on the beach and the umbrella hidden in the flowers, perfectly connect the first and third stories, and the silly beach lifeguard is the only one running through the three stories. Witnesses make the film form a circular narrative structure that is not rigorous but endlessly interesting. This kind of narrative trick makes the movie fans unexpectedly find more fun in the laughter, and the second paragraph that confuses reality and dream is also this kind of trick that the director loves and confuses the audience, so the seemingly bland narrative becomes endless good news.
In this non-native language work, Hong Changxiu created a kind of textbook-style English lines. This kind of rigid and boring dialogue brings out a dry and awkward sense of humor, but it often directly hits the psychological state of the characters, and even tears. The utility of the characters disguised masks is also a means for the director to make clever use of cultural differences to create comedy effects. In previous works, his male and female protagonists often gradually revealed the subtle relationship between each other in constant awkward chats, usually related to desire. In this work involving different cultural backgrounds of the East and the West, this approach can produce unexpected results. The lifeguard devised an English adjective to praise the heroine, accidentally revealing his instinctive desire for women, while the third "Anna" wrote a letter to the lifeguard after the two married, the latter who did not speak English. I thought it was a love letter, but I couldn't understand the mentality of Western women, so I fell into a tangled and ridiculous situation.
This embarrassing sense of dislocation in different cultural contexts is not only the source of comedy effects, but also through this inspirational script writing, it shows the core values of his works: women's desire and happiness are both There are clear goals and directions to follow. In contrast, men are people who are led by desire. They are either innocent and childish, or they are wretched and ruthless. The contrast between the sexes is set in this transnational. More intense colors are reflected in co-productions.
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