The framing story has young film student, Won-joo (Jung Yu-mi) and her mother Park Sook (Yoon Yeo-jeong) hiding from their debtors in Mohang, a seaside town in Buan, North Jeolla. The bored younger woman sets out to write a screenplay whose plot will use the place they’re staying in for the location, but eventually comes up with three variants, using the same basic idea in all of them.
In each case, Won-joo's protagonist is a "charming French visitor" named Anne (Isabelle Huppert): in the first section, she's a famous filmmaker visiting a fellow Korean director Jong-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his very pregnant and jealous wife Geum-hee (Moon So-ri); in the second, she's the wife of a French motor-executive who comes to the same guesthouse to meet her lover, a Korean filmmaker, Moon-soo (Moon Sung-keun); in the third, she's a divorced housewife who arrives with her university lecturer friend Park Soon (again Yoon Yeo-jeong) for some peace and quiet, after her husband left her for his young Korean secretary.
Issues of infidelity are present in each story, as is a dim but muscular lifeguard (Yoo Jun-sang) whom Anne meets while strolling on the beach and looking (in all three episodes) for a mini-lighthouse.
As each "Anne" interacts with the locals, including Won-joo, who works at Anne's lodging and helps show her around, certain faces, situations and lines of dialogue recur, their effect and implications changing depending on context and delivery. |