Present Tense
By Matthew Eng
New York Film Festival 2024:
A Traveler’s Needs
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, Cinema Guild
A third of the way through Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveler’s Needs, Isabelle Huppert winks at a recent male acquaintance and emits a giggle that can only be described as coquettish—and proceeds to repeat the incongruous, ice-breaking gesture. My mind looped back to the first minutes of Maurice Pialat’s Loulou (1980), when Huppert’s wandering wife defiantly laughs in the face of the husband who has just slapped her, a mission statement for the career yet to come. Because her six decades on screen have been typified by performances of exacting, glacial minimalism, the sight of Huppert cutting loose remains so startling, in the same way that I continue to catch my breath ever so slightly when Greta Garbo guffaws in Ninotchka (1939). Huppert’s wink is indicative of the strange, low-intensity delights scattered across Hong’s new trilingual film, in which the actress returns for a third go-around with the Korean auteur to play a first-time French teacher starting over in Seoul.
Starting over from what is impossible to gauge—backstory is nonexistent in A Traveler’s Needs. Whatever life Huppert’s Iris has lived before she surfaced in the South Korean capital remains entirely off-screen, a mystery that Hong refuses to elucidate; it cannot be said for sure that she is even from France. She is a woman of spontaneous arrivals and departures: her younger, devoted roommate Inguk (the subtly endearing Ha Seong-guk) claims to have discovered her sitting on a park bench, playing a recorder out of key. Earlier, Iris seems to vanish into thin air on a pathway upon bidding farewell to a married couple played by Hong mainstays Kwon Hae-hyo and Lee Hye-young after spending an afternoon with them, imbibing makgeolli (Iris’s beverage of choice) and paying homage to the poetry (and physical beauty) of national hero Yun Dong-ju, tortured and killed for his anti-Japanese resistance during World War II. Lee’s Wonju has solicited Iris’s instructional services and stands in dry, quizzical disbelief of her tutor’s novel approach, at one point pleading with her daughter to introduce herself to Iris in French just to prove that this stranger, who admits she has no previous teaching experience, actually speaks the language she has been hired to teach. In a far cry from Duolingo, Iris requires her students to disclose and find meaning in their own experiences and render them into philosophical inquiries that are translated into French, transcribed on index cards, and dictated on cassette by Iris for her students to listen to and recite on tape recorders of their own. The hope is that they will grasp the language by putting it into sentences of substance, words which they can comprehend and retain through personal connection.
Hong makes no claims on the efficacy of Iris’s instruction, neither mocking nor extolling it. In collaboration with his leading lady, who has seldom appeared so playful and unguarded, he depicts Iris as supremely attentive and sympathetic to her students, while challenging them to dig deeper and shine a light on the thornier parts of themselves that they tend to keep buried. She has a tendency to tiptoe past people’s boundaries, working from the knowledge that there is always a tougher, more tender feeling trapped—or shrouded—under the first impression that we share with others. During their first meeting, Wonju plays the guitar for Iris and reveals that beneath the self-proclaimed happiness of her rendition lies an annoyance with her own technical limitations. This would be a normal admission were it not for the fact that this exchange is an almost verbatim iteration of an earlier one from the film’s first lesson with a piano-playing pupil named Isong (Kim Seung-yun). Hong’s cinema is no stranger to doublings and mirror images, but this interaction is especially perplexing, begging the question of whether Iris is pushing her students towards organic insights or persuading them to parrot her own platitudes.
Similarly puzzling is Hong’s decision to dispense with his central pedagogical premise at the film’s halfway mark and instead embed us in the unorthodox domestic situation of Iris and Inguk, the poet letting her freeload in his apartment, charmed—or perhaps blinded—by her gossamer sincerity and lofty aspirations. “She seeks enlightenment while living in the secular world,” Inguk tells his horrified mother (Cho Yun-hee), whose eruptive, Oedipal resentment towards Iris reignites the film’s final section, ruffling a surface so placid that it can occasionally become enervating.
The rapid rate at which Hong works makes it difficult to accept his films as standalone creations removed from a larger, late-career project, much less absorb each one with equal relish and admiration. (He has continued to generate two features a year since 2021.) This latest lacks the unmistakable emotional current of In Front of Your Face (2021) and The Novelist’s Film (2022) and its feints at everyday magic pale next to the seamless, time-bending latitude of Walk Up (2022). His long-take dialogues, with their casual detours and uncanny echoes, certainly rivet our attention—particularly when watching as typically insouciant a presence as Huppert stammer and humble herself in the face of Lee’s imperious probing and passive-aggressive puzzlement—but they also flirt with banality here, mostly in the idle chatter scripted between Huppert and her male scene partners.
A Traveler’s Needs comes alive not so much on screen as it does during the days and weeks that follow one’s viewing. Huppert’s Iris, with her green cardigan and quiet call to adventure that only she discerns, has kept meandering through my thoughts. Hong’s film is content, like its protagonist, to remain adrift, to forego the grand purpose and stray without end, to lose and find oneself in aimless search time and again. It has the grace to end on its airiest and most moving scene, in which Iris shares a bottle of makgeolli with Inguk in a twilit park and betrays an interest in him that might be more amorous than amicable, before setting back to a home that both is and isn’t hers. There are years when it seems that life keeps occasioning accidental connections or necessitating unexpected reinventions, when all that remains constant are the struggles to understand and be understood. In the midst of her wayward drift, Iris somehow unlocks all of this. Who knows where—or who—she will be this time next year?