A Traveler’s Needs

Hong Sang-soo and Isabelle Huppert were supposed to meet for dinner. So begins the story behind A Traveler’s Needs, Hong’s 31st film and third with Huppert after In Another County (2012) and Claire’s Camera (2017) — the latter serving as this critic’s very first introduction to the Sang-soo-niverse some seven years ago. “Everything you do to prepare a film with Hong Sang-soo is like you were already doing a Hong Sang-soo film,” the actress joked in an interview with Screen Slate. She’s not wrong. Not having seen each other since wrapping their second collaboration, the two planned to get together when they’d both be in Paris, with her returning from a shoot and him in town for a retrospective. Flash forward, Hong canceled on Huppert due to illness and the two met at his place instead. An hour into their impromptu change of plans, they’d set their minds on collab No. 3: Or, as we now know it, A Traveler’s Needs.

This spontaneity is textual, even for those who aren’t familiar with the traditional on-the-fly creative process for a Hong Sang-soo joint or the origins of this particular project. Iris (Huppert) — an English and French speaker living in Seoul — has recently stumbled into a job as a professeur de français of sorts. Her methodology is uniquely her own: Forgoing a textbook, she prefers to converse with her students, making small talk in English, eventually taking the lesson outside to casually dole out observations on their surroundings until a certain nerve is struck. One mentee mourns her father, spurred by a monument he funded. Another feels irritated by her husband, annoyed by the way he performatively bows at a poet’s memorial. Iris then writes down a French phrase on a flash card that channels their feelings: something emotional and real they can practice speaking out loud in lieu of the simplistic, child-like phrases typically featured when learning a new language.

It’s Huppert’s first movie with Hong since he assumed virtually every role of production. “[T]here’s no one,” she said in the same interview, reflecting on how things have changed on Sang-soo’s sets since Claire’s Camera. “It’s only him with a tiny little camera. And a girl … with the boom.” Accordingly, A Traveler’s Needs is the most laid-back work in their spiritual trilogy. That’s not to be confused with adjectives like “lazy” or “slow,” however. While unhurried, A Traveler’s Needs is very much alive, dynamically so. Hong ensures the always-mesmerizing Huppert is never not that, leaning into her otherness as a focal point instead of a foible. It’s a smart move, and an unsurprising one at that, considering the director’s decades-long fascination with the nuanced minutiae of communication.

“Big feelings erupting out of polite conversation” could summarize numerous scenes throughout Hong’s oeuvre, but there’s an added spin with Huppert present. In place of a drunken blow-up elicited by hours of cordial beating around the bush, Iris is determined to unearth her pupils’ innermost thoughts through unexpectedly direct questions that catch them off guard. Surprisingly, not only does this technique work, but the resulting word-of-mouth actually helps her establish a lucrative clientele. “I might have stumbled upon a new way of teaching French,” she tells her roommate In-guk (Ha Seong-guk), amazed she’s finally able to give him part of the rent money after crashing with him, free of charge, for a couple of months. Likewise, when working with Huppert, Hong comes across new methods of his own: By inserting a distinctive character such as Iris into a framework as consistent as his, A Traveler’s Needs stumbles on a new way of telling a Sang-soo story.