Berlinale Review: “A Traveler’s Needs”

Travel is a funny thing: the sense of displacement rubbing up against the excitement of being in a new place and meeting new people. As a frequent rover, it’s something that I experience a lot: existing in constant limbo, feeling alive while feeling like I can’t have a life at all. Perhaps those thoughts are too deep for A Traveler’s Needs, writer and director Hong Sang-soo’s comical portrait of Iris (Isabelle Huppert), an enigmatic Frenchwoman trying to scrape out a living in Korea. And yet, I felt that all the same.

Huppert leans in to Iris’s eccentricities, but not so hard that she becomes a caricature. She’s found on a park bench badly playing the recorder, and taken in as a roommate by a younger man, In-guk (Ha Seong-guk). She teaches French to some local Koreans, although not using the expected methods; she asks her pupils questions about themselves in English and writes down the French translations on index cards that she passes along to them to memorize. I-song (Kim Seung-yun), the young woman we first see with Iris at the start of the film, appears content to follow Iris’s line of thinking, while Won-ju (Lee Hye-young) and Hae-soon (Kwon Hae-hyo), the older couple Iris has the next lesson with, question why there isn’t a textbook. And yet, they go along with her as well. There’s something inexplicably captivating about Iris and her mystique. We don’t know where she came from or where she’s going. One minute she’s heading off with her funky shuffling gait, her sunny dress, hat (“I love my hat”), and bright green sweater that are so vibrant against the neutral interior spaces she inhabits almost blending her in with the trees in the park; and then, poof, she’s gone.

But there’s more to Iris than the mildly chaotic energy she channels. Her dependence on makgeolli, a rice wine that she says she drinks with every meal, hints at something sorrowful lurking down deep that only the woozy bliss of the liquor can prevent from bubbling up. And her haphazard teaching methods play more like attempts to probe into the hearts and minds of her students; when she asks I-song what she feels when she plays piano, and I-song simply responds, “happy,” Iris presses her for a further explanation until an entirely new picture of her response emerges. 

Hong keeps Iris as mysterious as possible. The motivations behind her almost flirty interactions with In-guk and Hae-soon remain inscrutable. His loose sketching of the character may be too vague for some, but this is more a benefit than a deficiency, allowing the audience to project their own experiences into their reading of Iris. Perhaps the best insight we receive into just why Iris is so compelling when we know so little about her is when In-guk’s mother surprises him with a visit and is perplexed to find a woman about her age in his apartment. She calls him out on just this, asking him, in one of this otherwise breezy film’s most barbed scenes, how he can like someone he doesn’t know anything about, to which In-guk comments on Iris’s sincerity. This is Huppert and Hong’s— both extremely prolific artists— third collaboration, and the sixth film Hong has premiered at Berlinale since 2020, so he’s clearly a festival and audience favorite. A Traveler’s Needs is both a light crowd-pleaser (its already brief 90 minute runtime flies by), and a gentle ode to the places and people we move through in life.

A Traveler’s Needs had its world premiere at the 74th Berlinale on February 19. Runtime: 90 minutes.