Hong Sang-soo's A Traveler's Needs—which screens today at the BFI London Film Festival—is the first of two films this year from the prolific Korean director, whose other 2024 effort By the Stream played at last month's Toronto IFF. Hong also made a brace of films in 2023—the first of his releases last year was In Water, a work which caused a few ripples on account of it mostly being shot out of focus (moreover, it was barely an hour long—although some viewers may have considered that to be a blessing). Those still traumatised by that blurry, hazy specatacle will be pleased to learn that A Traveler's Needs, in terms of its form, is much closer to orthodox filmmaking than it is to the (literally) opaque In Water.
A Traveler's Needs stars the incomparable Isabelle Huppert, who here reunites with Hong following their earlier collaborations In Another Country and Claire's Camera. The film finds Huppert back in East Asia just one year on from her turn in Élise Girard's Sidonie in Japan, and while Girard brought her outsider's eye to that film, which followed the title character on an overseas book tour, Hong is firmly on home soil—both literally and figuratively—with his second-latest picture. Hong's films are something of an acquired taste, with his low-budget tales of the quotidian as likely to bore as to enthral viewers, but he has a devoted fanbase and is a mainstay at several of the world's leading film festivals.
Huppert's Iris is a Korean-based Frenchwoman who gives language lessons to locals, and she seemingly has no teaching experience or qualifications. Her methods are unconventional, to say the least: a typical one-on-one session with Iris sees the student engaging in casual conversation (in English) with their teacher, before Iris homes in on a particular emotion the student has just experienced. Once these feelings have been verbalised, Iris then proceeds to scribble down a French translation—often with a degree of poetic licence—on an index card. The student is then instructed to repeat this phrase as often as they can, with the idea being that the recital of such a personal statement will help la langue française sink in.
The inscrutable Iris has no backstory, and thus seems to exist only in the present; she spends much of what she earns on bibimbap and makgeolli, and her great fondness for the latter becomes something of a leitmotif. Iris is at the same time present and absent, assured and uncertain, and her dichotomous nature provides no clue as to what her raison d'être might be—is she an agent of chaos, à la Huppert's Caterine in I ♥ Huckabees (who peddles "cruelty, manipulation and meaninglessness"), or up to something much more benign? What I do know is that I could have watched this enigmatic character all day long; it is only in the moments when Huppert is off screen that the brittleness of Hong's setup is exposed.
