A Traveler’s Needs (2024) ‘MIFF’ Movie Review: Isabelle Huppert is at Her Beguiling Best in Hong Sang-soo’s Evasive Charmer

Hong Sang-soo’s latest film, A Traveler’s Needs, marks his third collaboration with French legend Isabelle Huppert. In Sang-soo’s prolific career, this collaboration has almost always worked seamlessly, the actor slipping hand in glove into his charming, modest, and fragmentary portraits of life in Seoul.

Huppert essays a Frenchwoman, Iris, who is in Seoul when the film opens. We are never told what prompted her move. We follow her as she goes around offering prospective students a taste of her strange, unconventional style of teaching French. Certain key repetitions are folded into her interactions with pupils. She asks them what they feel while playing a musical instrument. Limited in English, they take recourse to banal, superficial words. But she probes harder. “What did you feel deeper?” The second pupil, Won-ju ( Lee Hye-young) is taken aback when Iris casually reveals she has never taught previously and that she devised her unusual method just few months ago. Doesn’t that make her a guinea pig? Won-ju asks with barely concealed concern.

However, Iris exudes a curious charm that easily pulls in people despite an initial wariness. After extracting a kind of internally suggestive confession from them, she jots them down on index cards and hands them a recording of her uttering those lines. Her proposal is that reciting sentences that “hit emotionally” instead of learning bland, generic customary remarks would help them to make more meaningful inroads into the foreign language. Their hearts would have “assimilated” the foreign language, she urges.

Even Won-ju’s husband ( Hae-soon) can’t help but make a clear pass at Iris. She, too, makes it clear to him that she is perfectly capable of playing along. Some such flirty, mischievous edges to Iris that Huppert embodies with insouciance and levity are a delight to watch. Iris likes to probe into people’s recesses while projecting absolute guilelessness. She makes a show of not knowing what specific effects her approach has on those who decide to give her a shot. Yet, there’s an unmistakable sliver of pure confidence she has in her method. This peculiar balance is fascinating to observe. Iris guides people to unassumingly unlock seemingly hidden aspects of their own selves and emotions that they might otherwise keep out of view.

We aren’t told anything at all about Iris’ past. She exists exultantly and wholly in the present. This is how she prefers to be perceived. Without the scaffolding of elaborate history, this character naturally and inevitably becomes an object of suspicion. Her flatmate, In-guk’s mother (Yun-hee Cho), is outraged. Seething with disbelief, she rails at In-guk (Ha Seong-guk) for his gullibility. He insists that he does know her very well. They have connected.

He cannot quite explain it, but he adds that her quest for illumination and “sincerity” has endeared him to her. Nothing convinces the mother, who is upset and demands that he do an immediate background check on Iris and inquire deeper about her past. The mother cannot simply fathom how he could be so trusting of a complete stranger, though she doesn’t nudge him about how much the living arrangement of sharing the rent benefits him as he is barely scraping by.

To him, Iris is a special friend because she is a constant source of support, urging him to stay committed to his poetry even if it doesn’t seem sustaining and hopeful. But could it be that she wishes for him to see as more than a friend? She does give him ample, light hints, which he steadily deflects innocently and shyly.

Huppert’s performance makes Iris flitter with a lively spark. She swoops in and out of conversations. Characters even joke about how she seems to disappear into nowhere the minute they turn their back on her after bidding her goodbye. Many of the conversations echo down to the exact refrains. Characters converge over poems inscribed in public spaces, on rocks and walls. The overlaps don’t startle Iris; it is as if she draws the people she meets towards a common register. Huppert’s performance is richly alive to the enigma and especially an aura of suspension that cradles the character. There’s a pert energy she brings, teasing and challenging but also always certain to step back when the other person gets overwhelmed. A Traveler’s Needs is as light and elusive as gossamer, calmly centered by Huppert’s tantalizing, sparkling performance.

A Traveler’s Need screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2024.

A Traveler’s Need (2024) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia

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