In A Traveller’s Needs, Iris (Isabelle Huppert) offers her South Korean students something she describes as a new way of learning French. Instead of the conventional practice of grammar, vocabulary and conversation, she probes them about themselves in English, they respond, and she tosses back flowery French translations of their answers. Then she instructs them to practice reading only her phrases. As language learning, it’s bizarre and practically useless – something one could also say about Hong Sang-soo’s latest outing, a seemingly poetic treatise devoid of any emotional engagement for its characters or any philosophy of life for viewers to take away.
And more devastatingly, A Traveller’s Needs is rarely funny. Take what’s perhaps supposed to be the drollest moment in the film. Having become aware of the exalted socio-economic standing of her lawyer-turned-businessman student (Kwon Hae-yo), Iris tries to seduce him with a pathetic routine of winks and girly giggles. Maybe Hong wanted to tease hilarity out of the normally stoic Huppert hamming it up, but the scene is more cringe-worthy than ground-breaking.
Having placed all his bets solely on Huppert’s eerie presence, Hong has somehow forgotten to reinforce his screenplay with his trademark barbed humour and nuanced tristesse. Still, this Hong-Huppert double-act has generated headlines for him at the Berlinale, where he is making his fourth stab at the Golden Bear in five years. Considerably more lightweight and much less insightful and laugh-out-loud than the South Korea-set In Another Country (2012) and Cannes-set Claire’s Camera (2017), both starring Huppert, A Traveller’s Needs should still engage buyers basking in the glow of these two darlings of international arthouse cinema.
Seemingly untrained and unprepared for the banality of tutoring people – she’s merely a French visitor trying to find some means of sustenance for her new life in South Korea – the bored and edgy Iris improvises her new teaching technique during a lesson with her pianist-student I-song (Kim Seung-yun). After listening to I-song’s piano-playing and hearing the young woman’s teary memories of her father, she asks her some superficial questions and offers what seems to be profoundly lyrical translations of her answers, then asks her to record those lines – hipsters, take note! – on a Walkman.
And then repeat: Iris tries the same tack with the affluent and middle-aged couple Won-ju (Lee Hye-young, the star of Hong’s much better The Novelist’s Film from 2022) and Hae-soon (Kwon Hae-yo). She somehow manages to coax the initially wary pair into responding to the same trivial questions in nearly the exact manner and wording as the previous student. Cue the flowery translations and her fee (in cash).
In between, we see Iris wandering around town to fulfill her mundane needs: she chomps on a cheap set lunch at a local restaurant, and dips her bare feet in a stream. The what and the why behind her arrival in South Korea is left largely unexplained, and the most we get to know her is in a conversation with In-guk (Ha Seong-guk), the young man whose apartment she is staying in. Her presence will eventually bring about trouble for her friend, who gets a massive earful from his mother (Cho Yun-hee) for doing bad business with the expenses Iris’s stay will incur.
The passive-aggressive screaming match between mother and son is perhaps the closest A Traveller’s Needs gets to the highs of Hong’s heyday, when he would drench his films in acerbic commentary about the fake emotions and hypocrisy underscoring the pleasantries people regularly trade in. There’s hardly a trace of that here, despite the wealth of opportunity offered by the clashing personalities of the blunt Iris and the equally headstrong Won-ju. Maybe Hong’s humour simply couldn’t come through in English and French: the conversations are mostly dull and the encounters uneventful.
More present is Hong’s trademark minimalism, thanks to the multi-hyphenate again performing every production-related role in the film. It has worked wonders before, when his stories and screenplays offered much richer and revealing takes on either the Sartrean dictum of other people being the epitome of hell, or the naïve belief in a pure and higher calling for great art or a perfectly lived life. But lacking here are simmering bitterness and sadness, and Hong may need to rethink his act as his near-inevitable appearance as Cannes looms.
Director-screenwriter-producer-cinematographer-editor-music composer: Hong sang-soo
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hye-young, Kwon Hae-yo
Production companies: Jeonwonsa Film Co.
World sales: Finecut
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In English, French, Korean
90 minutes
