At the 2024 Berlin Festival, viewers have already been treated to one film in which a bunch of French actors walk around the landscape pretending to be alien interlopers (cf Bruno Dumont’s L’Empire). We now have another – say, “coucou!” to Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveller’s Needs, as Isabelle Huppert (the pair’s third collaboration after 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera) heads back to Korea to play a very special and very odd type of language teacher that only she could pull off.
You get a slap on the wrist for describing each new Hong Sang-soo film as “more of the same” or complain that the director is someone who gets by from film to film by resting on his micro-minimalist laurels. And rightly so, as with each new work, Hong does employ subtle variation in not so much aesthetic and style but in the shape of what can be construed a cinematic work; more interested in presenting his artistry through modernist or freeform structure and characterisation than anything that might seem too gauche, suggestive or obvious.
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For A Traveller’s Needs, there’s a slight return to the cyclical narrative motion he loves so much as Huppert’s Iris spends time with her various unwitting clients, ignores them, possibly patronises them and, finally attempts to dig the dormant emotion from their souls in what she describes as the unique (and completely unofficial) teaching technique she has somehow devised. When you see it, you might imagine it’s rather similar to how Hong makes movies (intended as a compliment!).
Iris wanders the landscape in a summer dress, a green cardie and a straw hat, blowing (badly) on a recorder in the park like some off-kilter siren, and then quaffing supermarket makgeolli in vast quantities. Hong’s early films all took an interest in how the consumption of alcohol alters our pillars of social perception, but what this film does is present a character who seems to become more demure and coherent the more she drinks.
It’s one of Hong’s most outwardly funny films, and he reminds us (once more) that while Huppert may be best known for her “straight” performances for the likes of Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Paul Verhoeven et al, at her heart she is a titan of slapstick and cultivating screen awkwardness to an almost unbearable degree. Just the way she sips her makgeolli is a joy to behold.
In its third act, we discover that this alien being has placed a much younger man under his spell, and is forced to go on a long wander while he reveals to his mother the details of this unlikely new crush. Sadly, this removes the focus from Huppert, and the laugh quotient sags considerably as we have to witness a protracted and circular argument between mother and son.
But even the snippets of Iris on her little walk are a delight, particularly a moment where she walks onto a rooftop that is painted the same fetching shade of green as her cardigan. It’s a lovely film and not a particularly demanding one from this director (his last one, In Water, was purposefully filmed out of focus). But where the humour perhaps asks the viewer to not take the action too seriously, it’s also a perceptive film about the performative coping strategies of a stranger in a strange land.
