Claire's Camera

Min-hee Kim and Isabelle Huppert bond in Claire's Camera

Sang-soo Hong's Claire's Camera is a wispy slice of life that would evaporate before our eyes if not for its moral acumen and directorial commitment. The film concerns a film industry worker who is unexpectedly fired while working on a project in Cannes. Jeon, the young woman who has been canned, is given no objective reason for the firing by her boss, Nam, but only a vague explanation that she has not been totally honest. As it turns out, it is Nam who has not been totally honest. She has fired Jeon for a drunken one night stand with a director with whom Nam has been having a clandestine affair. The titular Claire is a Parisian tourist who befriends Jeon and, through her photographs of the various characters, acts as a deus ex machina to right the wrongs that have been done to Jeon.

At times, the film seems paper thin. It is as if Hong had two weeks in Cannes before the festival and the services of Ms. Huppert and needed to concoct a film on the fly. However, the charms of ms. Huppert and Min-hee Kim as jeon go along way to sell the film despite its flimsy premise. Hong uses zooms within static shots to emphasize the solitude of each character wrestling with their own moral dilemmas. The Cannes he pictures is not a party paradise, but a resort town in off-season filled with run of the mill cafes and third rate hotels too close for comfort to the train tracks.

The deglamorization of the settings adds weight to the film's portrayal of the characters' moral balancing act. At the conclusion, Jeon is seen duct taping boxes of equipment to take back to Korea. A moral equilibrium has been regained, but Hong has shown us how thin the veneer of civility is in modern society.