Borderlines: A Traveler's Needs (12A)

A deliciously mischievous comic turn from Isabelle Huppert as Iris who has set up as a French language teacher in Korea using her own rather baffling methods. Iris has no backstory. We’re introduced to her through a couple of her bizarre but relaxed teaching sessions in which, with complete self-assurance, she converses with her pupils (in English!). Punctured with small cultural incongruities, including Iris’s partiality for makkeolli, a potent Korean milky rice wine, we pick up more detail but resolve nothing. This is South Korea’s super-prolific director Hong Sangsoo’s third collaboration with Huppert and perhaps the most delightful in its gentle, oblique humour that touches on language, poetry, exile and the art of communication.

DIRECTOR: Hong Sangsoo

CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hyeyoung, Kwon Haehyo