A Traveler's Needs

​AFI FEST 2024: Film Review

According to its mission statement, “AFI FEST… showcase[es] the best films from across the globe to captivated audiences in Los Angeles. With a diverse and innovative slate of programming, the film festival presents a robust lineup of fiction and nonfiction features and shorts… along with panels and conversations featuring both master filmmakers and new cinematic voices.” The American Film Institute’s annual film fete took place October 23-27 at the TCL Chinese Theatre (that iconic movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with stars’ cement footprints in its famed courtyard) and the nearby TCL Chinese 6 Theatre, located beside Hollywood Blvd.’s fabled “Walk of Fame.”

One of AFI FEST’s top virtues is that it brings many foreign films to L.A., including South Korean writer/director Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveler’s Needs, which won the Silver Berlin Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. A Traveler’s Needs is a mildly amusing slice of life about an itinerant, eccentric Frenchwoman named Iris (Isabelle Huppert in her third collaboration with Hong) who, for some reason that’s never specified, lives in Seoul. Overseas there is a big demand for English teachers in many countries, and here, to get by, Iris becomes a private tutor – however, of her native French. (I don’t believe Iris actually speaks Korean.)

She has a very idiosyncratic method of teaching that suggests Iris is just intuitively teaching off- the-cuff and on her own, not as part of any sort of certified school with trivial things like, you know, curricula. The free-spirited Iris’ impromptu classes also appear intended to impart life lessons, not just mundane matters, like you know, how to speak the language she’s actually been hired to teach. Part of her freewheeling tutoring sessions with Iris’ private clients in their middle class homes includes drinking copious amounts of red or white wine and makgeolli, a local brew that’s a milky rice wine.

Iris is a bit kooky; she wears wide brimmed straw hats and enjoys gamboling around Seoul. It turns out that the 50-something (if not older) Iris is living with the 20-something poet Inguk (Ha Seongguk, a veteran of other Hong films), who appears to have artsy aspirations. The nature of their relationship is, like so much in this droll trifle, unexplained. In fact, when Inguk’s high-strung mother Ranhee (Ha Jinwha, whose character is probably younger than Iris) makes a rare unannounced visit at Inguk’s flat, the meddling mom discovers Iris for the first time and questions what her son really knows about Iris’ background. His utter lack of information regarding Iris’ backstory really irks Ranhee.

Indeed, the audience could be asking the same question, which Hong never bothers to answer in his slight, simply told story. Now 71-years-old, Huppert is one of France’s most prominent actresses, who played the title role in Claude Chabrol’s 1991 Madame Bovary. Although light is never shed on her character’s backstory – how did she come to Korea? why? what did she do back in France? et al – if you go with the flow, A Traveler’s Needs is a picaresque, picayune picture. I used to believe in the notion of “small films” about everyday people, which as I recall was part of the French New Wave’s ethos (Truffaut being a case in point), and Huppert makes this breezy little movie an enjoyable, whimsical bagatelle worth watching. Hong’s movie has repeat references to poetry, so I guess this filmic frippery is intended to be poetic. But like so many poems, who knows what the heck it means?

A Traveler’s Needs is in Korean, French with English subtitles and will have a limited theatrical release in the U.S. starting November 22.

For info about AFI Fest see: https://fest.afi.com/.

Ed Rampell has been nominated for three National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards in these categories:

Kathy Bates is being honored with the Legend Award at the NAEJ ceremony, and Melissa Etheridge, Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Frazier are also receiving awards.