THE STORY – A French woman drinks makgeolli in Korea after losing her means of income, then teaches French to two Korean women.
THE CAST – Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hye-young & Kwon Hae-hyo
THE TEAM – Hong Sang-soo (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
In “A Traveler’s Needs,” her third collaboration with Korean director Hong Sang-soo, Isabelle Huppert portrays Iris, a French woman traveling through Korea who arrives in Seoul with no visible means of financial support. She’s quite a sight as she wanders through the city wearing a straw hat, floral sundress, and green cardigan, attire one would be more likely find at a Parisian garden party than on the streets of Seoul. Recognizing her status as a stranger in a strange land, she decides to use the language difference to her advantage and offers her services as a French language teacher to willing Korean students.
Her technique, however, is questionable. She first invites her students to perform a meaningful activity – playing the piano, for example – and then grills them on what they are feeling at that moment. When they express an honest and true emotion, Iris scribbles those words on her stacks of index cards, explaining her dubious theory that if you can attach French words to an emotional feeling, you can better learn to understand the language. Even her most eager students at times look skeptical.
That’s the set-up for the prolific Hong’s latest slice of life, his ninth feature in the past four years. His production style has traditionally been fast and loose, and “A Traveler’s Needs” is no exception, with a shooting schedule lasting a scant 13 days. For Hong, this constitutes a lengthy shoot, at least compared with his previous collaborations with Huppert – 2017’s “Claire’s Camera” and 2012’s “In Another Country” took six and nine days to shoot, respectively.
Like many of Hong’s best films, the narrative structure of “A Traveler’s Needs” is largely a series of conversations, this time between Irish and her students and new friends, usually over a meal and almost always accompanied by prodigious amounts of alcohol. For Iris, her drink of choice is makgeolli, a milky rice wine that helps to loosen her up as she talks with her students, most of whom are played by members of Hong’s acclaimed repertory company (In fact, one of this film’s key actors, Kwon Hae-hyo, stars in Hong’s other 2024 release, the terrific “By the Stream”).
To record his character’s conversations, Hong utilizes long single-shot takes, beginning with small talk (as it does in life) and eventually turning to what he wishes to be the meat of each encounter. In Iris’s case, the subject usually involves language and the difficulties that one encounters when trying to reach someone when you don’t speak their language well. With a storyline that consists of more of a collection of interactions than a plot-driven narrative, the quality of the film’s segments, like any anthology, tend to vary. A few conversations begin promisingly, then go nowhere, though most come to some kind of connection and are often surprising.
What ties these various exchanges into a coherent whole is, not surprisingly, Huppert. A consummate actor who, throughout her career, has been unafraid to portray troubled or complex characters, Huppert brings a refreshingly different side of herself in her films with Hong. She’s loose, funny, and displays an unerring sense of comic timing that she’s rarely had a chance to display onscreen. But the great dramatic actor we all know is ever-present, with Iris’s neuroses and insecurities never far from the surface. It’s the kind of nuanced comic work that only an actor of Huppert’s dramatic skill can deliver with such ease.
Even if the quirky charms of “A Traveler’s Needs” are not quite enough to place it in the top tier of Hong’s work, there’s still enormous pleasure to be had at its perceptive look at the games that even well-intentioned people play. In Hong’s eyes, sometimes it’s not just language differences that keep people from truly understanding each other.