This article appeared in the November 15, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sangsoo, 2024)

There is something oddly indeterminate about the Korean title of Hong Sangsoo’s 31st feature, whose English translation is A Traveler’s Needs. While “여행자의 필요” is a grammatically correct phrase, it is rather unusual to see a stand-alone use of “필요” in noun form to denote “needs.” When I came across the Korean title, I was initially unsure whether it meant “a traveler’s needs” or “in need of a traveler.” This is not the first time Hong has played with titles across different languages. His 2005 film 극장전 is known in English as Tale of Cinema but as “In Front of a Theater” in Chinese. Both are correct interpretations. But there is much more than playfulness to the gap between “여행자의 필요” and “a traveler’s needs.” Whether the film is about the needs of the traveler in question—Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a French teacher in Seoul—or about the needs she fulfills in the locals around her is a question the film leaves us to ponder.

In the first half of the film, we see Iris giving idiosyncratic language lessons to clients. Instead of using textbooks, she asks her students to elaborate on how playing an instrument, thinking about their fathers, or seeing a man bow to a rock makes them feel; then she jots down the French words for their replies on index cards. Her first pupil, a young woman named I-song (Kim Seung-yun), is receptive to this unusual approach, but her second pupil, an older, married woman named Won-ju (Lee Hye-young), is skeptical. When Won-ju questions Iris about the effectiveness of her pedagogical method, she explains that the true objective of learning a new language is not to know more words, but to let the heart “assimilate” the language.

These lessons are conducted in English—a language to which Iris, I-song, and Won-ju are all “outsiders.” The film’s often generic and clunky English dialogue is already a product of translation and mistranslation. Reading between the lines of her students’ disfluent responses, Iris writes down and translates her impressions of their emotional landscapes into her native French—another act of translation. In Hong’s cinema, our judgments of others’ feelings can only be approximate and impressionistic, just like our efforts to understand one another’s words. During each of the lessons, Hong inserts what appears to be a shot of the trees from the students’ POV, slightly out of focus, as if to suggest that it is not objects themselves that we are able to grasp but only our perceptions of them.

Of course, translation is also an act of subjective approximation. Iris, Won-ju, and Won-ju’s husband (Kwon Hae-hyo) visit a Buddhist temple where they come across a huge rock inscribed with Yun Dong-ju’s poem “Foreword.” Yun is the most celebrated poet of colonial Korea, who risked his safety by writing in his mother tongue. The husband reads the poem aloud in Korean while Iris reads a strictly literal English translation by theologian Kwon Hyuk-il that she finds on the internet. Meanwhile, the version presented in the English subtitles is a less rigid translation from Hong and subtitler Darcy Paquet. Kwon translated the first two lines as “until the day of death, looking up to the sky / hope there isn’t a dot of shame,” staying faithful to the common tendency in the Korean language to omit pronouns. Hong and Paquet, on the other hand, opted for “so that I might face the sky / without shame to my last breath,” amplifying the confessional spirit of the original text by introducing a first-person speaker. Hong and Paquet’s version does not negate Kwon Hyuk-il’s metaphrase rendition, but taken together, the two English translations give Yun’s poem a sculptural quality, with both interpretations revealing different aspects of the words.

After the two French lessons, Iris goes back to the apartment she shares with a young poet named In-guk (Ha Seong-guk), whose relationship with her straddles romantic tenderness and desire for mentorship. His intimate conversation with Iris is interrupted by an unexpected visit from In-guk’s mother (Cho Yun-hee), which prompts Iris to leave the apartment quickly. The mother starts interrogating her son about the nature of his association with the much older Iris. Now that the dialogue is in Korean, with two characters conversing in a shared native language, it becomes much more precise, drawing upon intricate concepts and a wider vocabulary—but the magical moments of grasping for feelings with words never arrive.

The mother insists that In-guk knows hardly anything about Iris and reaches a comically Freudian conclusion that what he actually needs is a mother figure. He says he greatly admires this woman who “seeks enlightenment while living in the secular world” and “lives sincerely.” The Korean words he uses to denote “seeks enlightenment” carry a distinctly Buddhist tone, making Iris out to be a saint of sorts. Listening to her son’s ridiculous response, the mother asks him to differentiate “living sincerely” from “living to the fullest.” After many attempts at elaborating on his point using different words, all he ends up with is a puzzled expression.

Does he need Iris or does Iris need him? This is the question his mother can’t seem to untangle, and before leaving, she advises her son to ask Iris for more details about her past in France. When In-guk goes out in search of Iris and finds her sleeping on a rock, her face is presented in an out-of-focus close-up—a rarity for Hong, who usually defaults to medium shots. In-guk seems to have decided that he is content with a fuzzy impression of Iris. Rather than probing her mysterious past, he asks if she has been drinking makgeolli, a Korean rice wine that Iris loves. Perhaps it is that revelatory intimacy of halting, laboring communication that he seeks—communication that blurs the lines between needing and being needed.

Jawni Han is a writer and translator originally from Seoul, now based in Brooklyn.