Engaged in a lengthy process of simultaneous expansion and refinement, the indefatigable Hong Sang-soo seems to practice a new, yet knowingly familiar, alchemy with each successive project. He’s directed nine films since the start of this decade, each more stubbornly sparse and casually ornate than the last. As his pool of collaborators shrinks steadily in size (Hong now takes on every technical role except sound design), the emotional and textural scope of his cozily specific worlds continues to dilate. The first of the director’s two releases this year, A Traveler’s Needs, marks a return to some of the sites of wonder and estrangement that made him a critical darling in the 2010s, but it’s also the work of an artist emphatically concerned with finding ways for visual, aural, and linguistic modes of expression to be developed and pushed forward.
As the amateur French instructor Iris (Isabelle Huppert) drifts through a day’s worth of appointments and entanglements in Seoul, these sequential encounters begin to bleed into each other, and the film folds its temporal patterns of experience in on themselves without noticeably breaking its chronology and flow (sound familiar?). Huppert’s welcoming aura of detached candor and curiosity — by this point slightly alien to Hong’s richly desiccated frames — gives the proceedings an uncharacteristically sturdy center, throwing the usual alignments of his ensemble deliberately askew.
Iris’ lessons consist of conversations in semi-fluent English with her students, which lumber genially toward engagements with artistry; poetic inscriptions and shaky musical interludes, in turn, trisect her wanderings, unearthing emotions of unease and resentment that she transcribes for them in French once coaxed out. The rationale for her off-kilter pedagogy is that people are more inclined to memorize, and hopefully internalize, phrases that are emotionally significant to them, even though they may be difficult to understand.
“I hope it works,” she admits to her second clients — Won-ju (Lee Hye-young) and husband Hae-soon (Kwon Hae-yo) — after they share numerous bottles of Makgeolli, prompting a well-earned cross-examination by a woman who objects to being a guinea pig. In this case, the limits of communicating through mediatory English (which visibly hinders mutual expression elsewhere) works in Iris’ favor; Huppert’s ability to almost imperceptibly morph confusion into confidence through her intonations belies the fact that her character has no idea what she’s saying. By the end of Iris’ visit with the couple, they are both bewitched and mystified by her distinctive presence, and have paid her well for it. Iris — patient and pushy in equal measure — probes the various pressure points that language exposes, bridging the gaps between expression and understanding.
Whether her methods produce results or not is, of course, beside the point. A pivot away from her newfound vocation toward the cross-generational codependency she shares with her roommate (Ha Seong-guk) casts Iris’ mystical qualities, and the trammels of miscommunication in which she is tangled, in a new light. Iris becomes a subject of suspicion for the young man’s mother, who claims that Iris could be lying about her background and intentions. Her son sees right through this desperate, obvious bid to stave off perceived surrogacy, but in the context of Huppert’s subconscious equivocations, her line of questioning is relevant in ways that neither of them can grasp.
The resilience of human connection in the face of discord — stemming more often from shared fluency than failed linguistic exchange — shines through here, particularly in the moments when body language supersedes what can’t be verbally expressed. As chatty as anything else Hong has made in recent years, A Traveler’s Needs is underpinned by a deep sense of physicality, dramatizing the difficulty — and playfully questioning the necessity — of taking people at their word.
DIRECTOR: Hong Sang-soo; CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hye-young, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee; DISTRIBUTOR: The Cinema Guild; IN THEATERS: November 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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