A Traveler’s Needs Review: LFF 2024

A Traveler’s Needs is the latest slice of life drama from Korean autuer Hong Sang-soo

Iris (Isabelle Huppert) is a French language teacher living in South Korea, A Traveler’s Needs a simple vignette following one day in her life as she moves around the city meeting her students. Meeting first with a young woman who seems to be a returning client, and then a middle-aged couple who are interesting in engaging her for the first time, we quickly learn that Iris’ methods of teaching are unconventional to say the least.

Rather that using lesson plans or text books, Iris follows her clients around for a couple of hours, gets slightly drunk, and asks them probing existential questions about how they are thinking and feeling before translating their response into French, noting it down on a flashcard, and having the student memorise it. Despite them not speaking a word of French. Much like duolingo insisting on teaching you ‘’your cat has a beautiful profile picture” before “what time is the bus?” it seems absolutely nonsensical.

Whilst Iris might initially seem to be creating some sort of profound experience with this process – she claims the students need to feel the language in their hearts to truly understand it – we see her repeating supposedly personal and off the cuff flashcards with different students, suggesting it’s really not, and she is simply having them mimic phrases that are personal to her.

Despite Iris’ method clearly being snake oil and her frequently being quite rude and ill mannered, everyone she comes across seems utterly charmed by her. Hong hints at this impossible romanticisation of foreigners, particularly the French and French language, but also the challenges and surprising benefits of building new relationships when no one is speaking in their first language (Iris and her Korean friends all communicate in English.)

We come to find that Iris is living with a Korean man less than half her age, seemingly romantically entangled, after a chance meeting in the park. His mother is naturally concerned at the arrangement and wants to know how Iris came to be in Korea and what her backstory is – something we never find out, as any hint of further plot development or fleshing out of characters is frustratingly evaded.

Despite being only 90 minutes long, A Traveler’s Needs felt tediously long, and the fact that I checked my watch twice to see how long was left a pretty major red flag. There is very little plot to speak of, no questions asked and certainly none answered in this cryptic, opaque, slight drama.

For existing fans of Hong Sang-soo’s work I’m told that A Traveler’s Needs is much in the vein of his previous films – and there seem to be plenty of people writing letterboxd reviews who have clearly found a level of depth to it that evaded me – so there certainly will be an audience out there for this release. But for the unindoctrinated such as myself, this film was unfortunately extremely dull.

A Traveler’s Needs is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2024. It will recieve a limited cinema release on 22nd November 2024