SCREENING OF HONG SANG-SOO’S CLAIRE’S CAMERA (LA CAMERA DE CLAIRE).
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 28
AS PART OF THE TOURNEES FILM FESTIVAL OF FRENCH, FRENCH-SPEAKING AND FRENCH-PRODUCED FILMS ON CAMPUS JANUARY 31-MARCH 3, 2020
The screenings take place in the Bijou Auditorium as part of “Film Today” and “Film History”. They are free and open to the entire Institute.
French star Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sang-Soo, the South Korean master of wryly philosophical character studies and international beacon of independent filmmaking against the odds (he released four films in 2018), with this delightful comedy about Claire, a French music teacher and amateur photographer who travels to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time. Shot in under a week during the 2016 festival, La Caméra de Claire finds Huppert’s zany amateur artist roaming the streets taking Polaroids of strangers, uncovering the pockets of loneliness on the festival’s fringes. Claire’s theory that she can change people’s lives by taking their picture is tested when she meets the three protagonists of a festival micro-drama between Manhee, an attractive, young film sales agent; her boss Yang-hye, and So Wan-Soo, the “master” represented by Yang-hye compay. Relying on his trademark light touch and taste for meaningful (or surrealist?) coincidence, Hong Sang-soo turns Cannes’s sidewalk cafés and cocktail parties into a backdrop for chance encounters and drunken rants, whimsical digression and blunt injustice, once again achieving his distinctive strain of wispy comedy shot through with a vein of existential yearning.
Tournées Film Festival is made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), the French American Cultural Fund, Florence Gould Foundation and Highbrow Entertainment.
