de facto film reviews 3 stars

A Traveler’s Needs, the latest work from South Korean film maker Hong Sang-soo, stars Isabelle Huppert as a woman who, finding herself in South Korea, has come up with a novel way of making ends meet. She will teach people French, despite no training, by holding a conversation with them in English, and then translating it to French, for her students to then practice. The process is intense, resulting in deep discussions about how they feel, their place in the universe and how they relate to loved ones living and dead. Meanwhile, she drinks makegoli, a rice wine, to levels which unnerve some of her clients and their families. She also lives with a young man, in his early twenties, with whom she shares a strictly platonic, yet meaningful connection.

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This is all important to know, in order to understand the film. This is not a work that is really about a plot. Instead, it is about how it is about more than what it is about and the how, at times, will remind you of such richly dialogue and philosophy driven works as My Dinner With Andre, or The Before Trilogy, by Linklater. This is neither of those works, and does not really try to be, but it should give a viewer some frame of reference as to how this plays out.

The director uses a static approach, placing his camera on a tripod and only barely tracking anything, for there is very little movement. The film is mostly a series of filmed conversations. There are no closeups. There are no chase scenes or moments of grand excitement. Instead, the film is about how we see ourselves and others, about how we think or wish others to see us and what we most desire. We see this with multiple clients of our protagonist.

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In each case, something small is revealed about her, and something larger, and more significant, about her clients and their culture. There are themes of art and the eternal, of youth and missed opportunities. There is, of course, legacy, and guilt. Indeed, can we trust our protagonist? One character seems to think it may be wise to question her, and the film avoids telling us, certainly, if this is the case. The resolution is profound and meaningful, but only if you allow yourself to get absorbed into and swept along by the film’s unique rhythms.

Courtesy The Cinema Guild

This is not a film that is concerned with characters in a traditional sense, but rather with how they are and the ways in which that makes them who they are. This is cinema about the experience of being and knowing. There is something here reminiscent of gestalt, in that our protagonist helps her clients break themselves apart in order to put themselves back again, even if that is not what she intends. She does get paid well, and it therefore serves as a form of therapy, even if she calls it teaching them French. As such, the power of simply caring enough, or pretending to care enough, and to talk to and get others talking and thinking, is clearly shown as something which can yield surprising results.

A Traveler’s Needs opens at the Detroit Film Theatre on January 24th.