Two by Hong Sangsoo

Hong, who won his fourth Silver Bear when A Traveler’s Needs premiered in Berlin, “does more with less than any filmmaker now working,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. With Huppert, of course, he’s working with more than a little. Talking to Variety’s Patrick Frater back in February, Huppert explained why, after collaborating with Hong on In Another Country (2012) and Claire’s Camera (2017), she was eager to team up with him again. “He makes me reflect profoundly on the meaning of cinema,” she said. “Hong’s methods make me remember how cinema can be so vast and also so small. He manages to preserve both the power and scale of cinema while working almost alone.”

In A Traveler’s Needs, Huppert’s Iris has developed her own unorthodox method for teaching French to her students in Seoul. In conversations occasionally loosened up with makgeolli, the milky-white Korean rice wine, Iris burrows through her students’ natural defenses until they almost involuntarily give voice to their true feelings. Iris jots those responses down, translates them, and has her students memorize them. Her hunch, which she admits is unscientific and unproven, is that emotional investment in what’s being said will make a new language come alive.

Iris “may be a confidence woman or a ghost or just a lonely expat making things up as she goes along,” writes Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter. “Who knows?” But for Guy Lodge, writing for Variety, Iris is “hardly a cypher: Her face routinely clouds over with surges of anxiety, or breaks into beatific delight, so we know—in line with her favorite, much-repeated question—what she’s feeling, if never exactly what she’s thinking. (Which is the greater tell?) And she seems happily unbothered by what others think or feel about her . . . Iris seems at once blissful and sorrowful, or maybe neither, given the projection that A Traveler’s Needs requires of us. Either way, she appears to exist almost exclusively in the present tense. Hong’s sly, slippery oddity suggests there are worse ways to live.”

At Reverse Shot, Matthew Eng finds that A Traveler’s Needs “lacks the unmistakable emotional current of In Front of Your Face (2021) and The Novelist’s Film (2022) and its feints at everyday magic pale next to the seamless, time-bending latitude of Walk Up (2022).” Hong’s “long-take dialogues, with their casual detours and uncanny echoes, certainly rivet our attention . . . but they also flirt with banality here, mostly in the idle chatter scripted between Huppert and her male scene partners.”

Slant’s Chuck Bowen suggests that Huppert leaves “a hole at the center of A Traveler’s Needs that’s atypical for Hong’s films” and that Kim Minhee, “a veteran of similar roles in Hong’s films, as well as his partner and a key collaborator behind the scenes, might’ve made a meal of this part, suffusing it with a customary sense of gravity and turmoil.” Bowen is far more taken with By the Stream, in which Kim plays Jeonim, an artist and lecturer at a women's university who asks her uncle Chu Sieon to write and direct a short play for her students.

Bowen points to “an extraordinary scene early in By the Stream in a university office in which we see: Jeonim slumped in the foreground, seemingly sad and resentful of her uncle’s blossoming relationship with her mentor, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee); Cho Sieon in the middle ground, obliviously praising Jeong’s artwork; and Jeong in the background, working on something in anticipation of an evening with Cho Sieon. With so much subtext so casually communicated, the scene feels as if it’s emitting a current, and, remarkably, nearly every scene in By the Stream has such a buzz.”

“It is a mark of the film’s eerie, unusual flow that by the end, one would be hard-pressed to summarize it,” writes Lawrence Garcia at In Review Online, “not because of any modernist manipulation in the manner of Resnais, say, but simply because of the unstable significance of any given scene.” At Reverse Shot, Shonni Enelow proposes that the staging of the short play “provides the dramatic scaffolding for the unfolding of life, but both the skit and the college life that surrounds it are presented as spontaneous, oblique, and devastating in their elisions.”

Kim won an award for Best Performance when By the Stream premiered in Locarno, and at one point in the film, Jeonim says that she’s seen “nothing, nothing at all” around the bend of that stream. For Enelow, like “all of Hong’s recent films—in which many of the same actors repeatedly perform, as a kind of repertory company—this is a film about actors, and about the form of art that only actors can do: the charging of ‘nothing’ with the intensity of what is humanly inexpressible, and yet humanly expressed.”