A Traveler’s Needs

Studio: Cinema Guild
Director: Hong Sang-soo

Nov 22, 2024 By Kaveh Jalinous Web Exclusive

It wouldn’t be a true year in film if Hong Sang-soo, one of South Korea’s most prolific and consistent auteurs, failed to release one (or more) films. Thankfully, Sang-soo’s newest work, A Traveler’s Needs, continues that streak. It may not be one of the director’s finest efforts, but even a missed layup from the director is a more-than-enjoyable experience at the cinema.

A Traveler’s Needs follows Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a French woman who moved to Seoul for reasons unknown and has been living in the city for an equally unknown amount of time. She spends her days giving French lessons to clients around the city. However, for most, her method—where she philosophizes with her clients about their interior thoughts and feelings before eventually translating their musings into French—might leave something to be desired.

The film’s first half is episodic-like, tracking Iris as she moves through her day, conversing with client after client. It may seem repetitive, but that’s the point. Like any Sang-soo film, A Traveler’s Needs is fascinated by the quirks of conversation, using simple settings, no-frills camera work, and simple dialogue to animate the characters’ emotions and feelings. In that sense, while it’s always interesting to see how Iris’ conversations differentiate depending on the clients she’s speaking with, it’s more interesting to see the ways the conversations are nearly identical to one another. Even her French-translated sentences, in the rare cases she speaks them, start to blend in the end.

The film’s second half is much more prosaic when Iris returns home to the flat of her roommate, Inguk (Ha Seongguk), who—after seeing Iris playing the recorder (“terribly”, he later admits) in a park one day—invited her to stay with him. The two foster a strong, questionably intimate friendship, but their reunion is shattered when Inguk’s mother shows up. The film then morphs into a curious examination of general differences, customs, and relationships. It almost feels like too singular a story for Sang-soo to tell, a director who usually has far more narrative tricks up his sleeve than what’s on display here.

The discordance between A Traveler’s Needs two halves works for the film and to its detriment. The film’s second half is far more interesting and profound than its dazed, somewhat repetitive counterpart, tackling harder-hitting themes in the process. It provides the film with the grounding it needs, whilst continuing the film’s broader questioning of why we care about people’s pasts and backstories so much, disregarding them in the present in search of those answers.

At the same time, though, A Traveler’s Needs feels too much like two different films packaged in one, in a way that isn’t as narratively or thematically challenging as it could be. Placed in the broader Sang-soo filmography, it feels a bit like self-sabotage. Because the director has told stories divided in half like this so many times—and so well at that—A Traveler’s Needs feels like a less-baked, less-defined version of those better films. And while it’s perfectly passable at the moment—and a welcome contribution to the always-exciting Sang-soo/Huppert collaboration—it rarely feels like anything more than that.

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