A Traveler’s Needs [2024]

 A Traveler’s Needs – Hong Sang-soo’s third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert – is a film of spontaneous comings and goings, loopy repetitions, eccentric digressions, and fleeting impressions. This is, furthermore, a droll and idiosyncratic tableau on improbable encounters and oddball language lessons. Huppert, whose fabled career is filled with incongruous, anomalous and unhinged characters, is a delectably strange cat here as Iris (Huppert), a whimsical and coquettish French woman of an unknown past and dubious disposition. Since her arrival in Korea, she’s been drifting in Seoul, earning money by teaching French to well-off locals using a self-devised method that’s hilariously weird, and sharing apartment with a naïve young guy for whom she’s somewhere between an attraction, wise mentor and unlikely mother figure. Over the amusing and playful narrative’s loosely-strung chapters, we see Iris teaching and interacting with a young woman who’s become fond of her quirky tutor; being interviewed by a woman (Lee Hye-young) who wants to employ her but is flabbergasted by her pedagogy, and then bonding with her and her genial husband (Kwon Hae-hyo) over makgeolli – Iris’ beverage of choice – and the poetry of Yun Dong-ju, who was arrested and killed at the age of 28 for his anti-Japanese resistance in occupied Korea during WW2; having meandering conversations with the infatuated Inguk (Ha Seong-guk) with whom she stays; and drinking more makgeolli and listening to bad English translations of Kwon’s poems. In a deadpan aside – the only stretch without Huppert in it – we see Inguk being berated by his passive-aggressive mother (Cho Yun-hee) who’s shocked at his choice of roommate. The minimalist script, consequently, unfolded as a charming and observational take on aimless travels, intercultural companionships and existential ennui.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: English/Korean/French

Country: South Korea