Claire's Camera

Director: Hong Sang-Soo
Year Released: 2017
Rating: 0.0

Man-hee (Kim Min-hee) gets fired from her job in Cannes, France for being "dishonest" and later befriends teacher Claire (Isabelle Huppert), who busies herself taking photos of every Korean in town ... oh, and there's a director hanging around named So (Jung Jin-young) who could be - and I'm not saying it is, by any means - Hong inserting himself in another one of his movies (unprecedented, I know!). Maybe - and I'm just spit balling here - the number of films he's been cranking out has taken its toll, because this expanded short is one of the very worst he's ever made: the interactions are stilted, it looks like the 'actors' are glancing off for clues as to what to say and Hong has them speaking English a lot of the time, which none of them are comfortable doing. I've seen more graceful productions from undergrads at USC, which is no slight on them because they aren't supposed to be world-famous talents. "You can write poems anytime you want. It's not that difficult," Claire says to Man-hee and I could only shake my head: writing poems is incredibly challenging and time-consuming ... if you want them to be good.