A Traveler's Needs Review

For a fan of slow cinema, Hong Sang-Soo needs no introduction. For those who aren’t, the 63-year-old director has cut his teeth in Korean and international film with 32 feature films since 1996 which seems like quite a large output but it makes sense with his style of filmmaking. Sang Soo is known for being quite the spontaneous director, not writing scripts in pre-production but rather waking up at 4 am every day on the shoot and adding words to his outline then influenced by his close relationships with the actors in his films. His films stay better grounded, slow, and mediated with long takes, and ambient sounds of city and nature while his characters carry out their everyday activities of domesticity.

A Traveler’s Needs is the 3rd collaboration with Sang Soo and lauded French actress Isabella Huppert, as she plays Iris; a French teacher with quite the unconventional method of teaching. The film opens with her having a heart-to-heart with a Korean woman, as she reveals her fears, walking past a memorial of her father, Iris asks her how she feels and she writes down these feelings on index cards and asks her to repeat them and memorise them.

Iris believes in feeling over function, if her students have a connection to the words they are saying, the language part will be picked up quite easily rather than pedestrian phrases about the weather and ice cream. Has she tested this theory or has any professional knowledge about teaching? No, but she trusts this system and maybe her students will gain something from the personal poetry of language rather than function. This could be used to describe the approach Hong Sang-Soo takes to this film as well.

A Traveler’s Needs often meanders in single shots with the camera except from the occasion dramatic pan or zoom, characters talk aimlessly but realistically with conversations often going from procedural to comedic and then profound. All are shot on a digital camera which is often unafraid to show its imperfect digital grain. This is a particular variety of arthouse filmmaking which I’m sure the average audience member could be bored to tears by but its wavelength makes boredom almost like a feature with the sense of naturalism The Traveler’s Needs has. Ambient noises of leaves swaying and rivers rushing undercut conversation as well as the usual city hustle.

We follow a day in the life of Iris, teaching French, musing on Korean poets, and hiding from her roommate’s mother. We aren’t told much what to make of these scenes or their level of importance but A Traveler’s Need’s sense of lull is infectious if you can let it be that and contains some of the most immersive filmmaking I’ve seen this year while also being the bare minimum of what would count as a movie.