Claire’s Camera + Night and Day

6:30pm Claire’s Camera (69m)
Hong’s 20th feature—one of his three films to premiere in 2017—is a light, sunny divertissement shot on the fly during the Cannes Film Festival. Set far from the red-carpet pomp, Claire’s Camera is a cautionary tale about mixing business with pleasure, and in its way no less philosophical than other recent Hong works. A sales agent (Kim Minhee) is fired mid-festival for her “dishonesty”—which turns out to be code for sleeping with a director who’s also involved with her boss. The revelations emerge with the help of a French tourist named Claire (Isabelle Huppert), a detective of sorts who helps others see their situations more clearly. Kim and Huppert make for a delightful pair amid the kind of cross-cultural comedy that also defined Hong’s Huppert-starring In Another Country.

8:00pm Night and Day (144m) | 35mm
A successful painter facing pot possession charges flees his sleepy Korean home for the streets of Paris in Hong’s ambling portrait of midlife male discombobulation. A run-in with an old flame, now unhappily married; a series of tearful phone calls to his wife back home; a cautious affair with a young art student; a visit to a church; brief stirrings of lust and affection and homesickness and regret—Hong captures it all with effortless grace and calm matter-of-factness, until a late-film swerve into fantasy caps the whole thing off with a mischievous question mark. An NYFF46 Main Slate selection.