Hal Kitchen
The name Hong Sang-soo holds a certain caché in certain film circles. The name Isabelle Huppert even more. Playing at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival, A Traveler’s Needs reunites the pair, having previously worked together on the celebrated In Another Country in 2012. I was previously uninitiated on the work of director Hong but in looking him up, was pleased to hear his style compared to that of Eric Rohmer, of whom I’ve lately become somewhat of a fan. However, the very second A Traveler’s Needs began I thought to myself, “Oh, so it’s literally an Eric Rohmer film”. In everything from the acting style, camera positioning, color, and offhand conversational tone, A Traveler’s Needs feels less like an homage to or evolution of Rohmer’s style—as seen in the films of Mia Hansen-Love who also worked with Huppert on the sterling Things to Come—but frankly, a mocking parody of it, as if, to use a lazy cliché, a piece of AI software had been commanded to print out a typically Rohmer film. It has the same feel of perfect emulation and the disquieting void of purpose or meaning that AI generation provides.
Now, I’m aware I’m flatly dismissing the latest work of an artist much respected in his own right, but this was not only my immediate first impression but the one that I sank deeper into as the cyclical, uninspiring story of A Traveler’s Needs proceeded. I can only say that it’s amazing what some people will find praiseworthy when it’s got Isabelle Huppert in it.
Huppert plays Iris, a woman whose situation is slowly revealed to the viewer throughout A Traveler’s Needs, though I wouldn’t hold my breath for anything in the way of real insight into her situation nor your own through it. She is first discovered teaching French to a young student in South Korea. Evidently an expat making a modest living sharing her one marketable skill, she is bilingual, though her second language is English, which most of the film is in, and not Korean. In that matter, as with much else, she’s at the mercy of her students who translate into English for her as well as financially supporting her extended holiday in their country. The extent to which she is truly living on the edge of society becomes clear through a series of deliberately inane, repetitive and often literally identical conversations with her students as the same motifs of performance and poetry recur. There are instances where a particularly patient or generous viewer may impose their own profundity onto a particular moment. They may find these motifs intriguing or our lead enchanting, but I must confess I struggled to find much of value in any scene in this.
The audience I watched A Traveler’s Needs with seemed to be enjoying it (those who did anway as there were many walkouts) primarily on the level of a comedy, finding its deadpan treatment of these absurd, uncomfortable interactions in some way amusing. I confess again that the joke eluded me, and I am forced to think they were laughing more at the film than with it, laughing at its boldness in subjecting its audience to such drivel. No, I don’t call the film drivel, it has assuredly more value than that, but most of the conversations that make up the majority of the film are quite objectively drivel. Vague, awkward pleasantries the characters dredge up desperately to fill the air in the conversation with this strange woman.
A Traveler’s Needs ultimately frames Iris as a kind of holy fool, living among us at her leisure, spreading joy where she goes. However, I don’t know that what Iris spreads could be called joy. Perhaps it is amusement, but more often just bemusement. She’s harmless. That much is clear, but I really am struggling to find what mysteries one could hope to unearth from this. The real mystery is, “Why are you showing me this?” Someone’s assuredly getting a kick out of it, finding some mundane poetry in it, because the reception has been, as with most of Hong’s films, generally positive. If I should find one, I promise to get them to write a review that can explain what this film is about, because its quotidian mysteries did little and less for me than many similar films have.
