The prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo teams up with French actor Isabelle Huppert for the third time in the effervescent, mysterious, and somewhat mystical A Traveler’s Needs. Premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival, the film features Huppert as Iris, a French teacher with no teaching experience who lives in Seoul. However, we learn that Iris does have a few months to consider how she thinks of her native language. This period of Iris’s life has given birth to her “system” of index cards. I’m giving the “system” more credit than it deserves, as she seems to use the index cards to write down her students’ admissions of aggressive or ambivalent emotions in French, after insistent prodding—though Hong never shows us what Iris actually writes on the cards (the second-best bit of the film).
This incongruity—a teacher who doesn’t really teach—and the oddity of the situations Iris effortlessly engineers, Hong plays for laughs. Iris regularly ignores her students—two Korean women who genuinely seem to want to learn French during her haphazard and wandering lessons—and spends most of her time wandering outside, drinking makgeolli, and playing the recorder. We never learn exactly what brought Iris to South Korea, where Iris was before, or why she left France, and so we encounter Iris as she is: a vaguely witchy odd duck with a penchant for leaving the room to smoke whenever anyone wants to play an instrument for her (the best bit of the film, in my opinion).
However, as the film is so intensely aware of Huppert’s presence and the charisma she carries, there’s a magical weight to her blankness, her unexplained idiosyncrasies. In one scene, she aggressively stomps on the feet of her roommate while they use her grounding mat before she throws herself on him in a hug and thanks him for his friendship. Her gratitude in that moment feels like a flower blossoming. Iris’s roommate, who might have fallen just a bit in love with her, tells his mother that Iris is a “sincere” person who lives her life with honesty. I would agree with him. Here, I think, lies the magic of Hong and Huppert’s collaboration: life can sometimes look like a shapeless series of moments, but underneath there lives a beating, open heart. 90 min.
Gene Siskel Film Center
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