A TRAVELER’S NEEDS
DIR. Hong Sang-soo, 2024, South Korea, 90 mins.
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hye-young, Kwon Hae-hyo
French lessons in English. Poetry and music. Makgeolli. Lots of makgeolli.
For A Traveler’s Needs (2024), his thirty-first feature, writer-director producer-cinematographer-editor-composer Hong Sang-soo has plugged the above variables into his template of conspicuous repetitions, and artists in moments of respite, eating, drinking and conversing with friends, acquaintances and lovers, creating something very recognizable for seasoned Hong viewers—that possesses just enough difference to push his mammoth multi-film project forward. Iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, Elle) returns for her third collaboration with the globally renowned Korean auteur, in this instance not able to speak a word of his native tongue as she tutors Korean French students in English. In her lightly comic lessons and in the poetry that appears in various forms, A Traveler’s Needs focalizes the act of translation with English serving as the film’s lingua franca.
In the context of this year’s previous Noble Theater Hong release, In Our Day (2023), which split its time narratively and biographically between a close Hong surrogate and the director’s partner and collaborator Kim Min-hee, A Traveler’s Needs can be read as a film about Isabelle Huppert, at least Huppert from the outside. Hong carefully attends to how his lead actress speaks (in English and French), smiles, laughs, and how she walks away in her wedges after bottles of Korean rice wine—while never suggesting that she is knowable, or even that we are seeing the “real Huppert,” as her comically exaggerated flirtations suggest. We have, simply, an actor that Hong’s camera likes a great deal.
Hong’s comedic Huppert is a uniquely rootless and breezy figure, traveling through a place where she does not speak the language, where she devises new (and somewhat dubious) methods of instruction for skeptical students, and where she wonders aloud if her much younger poet-roommate and (perhaps romantic partner) loves her only as a friend. When she asks this very question in the film’s final scene, Hong provides his character with a pathos that belies her flaky demeanor; he makes great use of Huppert’s strength as an actor as he plumbs a sudden depth of feeling beneath her otherwise silly artifice.
Ultimately, it is in the unique form of their repetitions that Hong’s films most distinguish themselves—repetitions that collectively suggest the unanimity of his larger film project where nearly every new film bears significant resemblance to its predecessors, and to what we know of the filmmaker’s biography (especially his life as a globally renowned art-house director). In this case, it is Huppert’s lessons where she hears one of her two students play music and then asks her student to recall what she felt when she was performing. Both female students (one younger, the other middle aged and married) provide near identical responses, suggesting a script that is being read and re-read. Whether there is more to it, such as that Hong is making a claim for all people or women of a certain type being the same, is better left as speculation for now.
A Traveler’s Needs likewise points the way forward toward Hong’s most recent film—yes, A Traveler’s Needs, a February 2024 world premiere and Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear winner, is not the director’s most recent film; such is the pace of the world’s most prolific art-house auteur. In moving from how the women feel during their musical performances to the French script that Huppert’s character produces (and encourages each to practice), Hong creates a link between inspiration, text and its execution. His second international prize-winning world premiere of 2024, By the Stream (which will open at the Noble Theater next year), explores this theme more expansively, especially in the stage play that we see from idea through rehearsal, production, and the post-play gathering where we get our requisite food, drink, and statements of meaning from the director’s young heroines—one more key direction in 2020s Hong.
If By the Stream is one of the director’s bigger recent efforts—and it is certainly his longest in some time at 111 minutes—A Traveler’s Needs is more modest in its subject and narrative approach, with its titular traveler Huppert spending time with two students, her roommate, and then the latter with his disconcerted mother as she gives them time alone. Hong stops short of the question of how we might live, preferring instead to portray his traveler simply living, constructing her existence in the present without fully explaining how she came to play her role.
-By Michael J. Anderson, PhD
