“I don’t know what you saw in the film – I’m curious”. Hardly the kind of words one might expect to hear from someone who has just been handed his fifth Silver Bear (for his second Grand Jury Prize, after The Novelist’s Film in 2022), but if they’re coming from the mouth of one Hong Sang-soo, well, then they’re completely in-character. (Might also have something to do with the fact that Albert Serra was the one to hand him the trophy.)

It might also be that he was making a very oblique commentary regarding the German industry’s long-standing, yet never-truly-spoken-out-loud discontent towards his particular brand of artisanal cinema – which, across the years, even led to critiques addressed to Carlo Chatrian. The Berlinale’s (now, ex-)artistic director programmed a film made by the prolific South Korean director at every single edition during his five-year tenure at the head of the festival, where he won an award at every edition except for the 2023 one (where his experimental-minded In Water screened in the Encounters section, rather than the main competition). The latter addressed said critiques at the press conference where this year’s selection was unveiled: hailing a director that is “unique in the history of cinema”, who does not bend to the “diktats of the industry” and that people who claim that his films are too similar to one another “cannot read within his shots”. (Indeed, one might book-end Chartian’s tenure at the head of the first of the big three European festivals with two particular, comedic close-ups in the cinema of Hong: that of the cat in The Woman Who Ran, 2020, and of the dog in his latest film.)

A Traveler’s Needs almost comes as an illustration of sorts to Chatrian’s latter assertion, and could indeed be read as a statement that Hong Sang-soo makes about himself, as a filmmaker: “Everything must stay the same, so that everything can change” (to invert the Prince of Lampedusa’s famous axiom). Here, he tinkers in such a conscious way with the rules of his cinema (and, thus, any assumptions thereof) that the final result bears his unmistakable marks and leitmotifs as an auteur, while also disrupting his regular narrative formulas, as any expectations that even long-haul spectators might have, slowly vanish in the film’s second half. It’s these little, sometimes incremental, changes that are hinted at through the film’s key phrase: an emotion that the protagonist identifies (or speculates?) deeply within the people she meets, beyond an apparently banal and socially awkward surface – the desire to constantly be another, which she writes down on a piece of paper, and asking them to memorize it.

Iris (Isabelle Huppert, in her third collaboration with the director) is somewhat of a mystery – at least, she seems so in a world (both on, and off-screen) so consumed by the need to define people; and her actions certainly reject any simple interpretation. She seems eager to enter various situations haphazardly and to languish in the moment, yet she always ends up wanting to escape them, if only just for the duration of a cigarette. She looks, acts, and dresses incredibly young, yet she is also visibly beyond her middle age. She takes delight in moments of sheer lightness, but cannot help herself to see trouble beyond the surface. While she seems to be very self-assured and confident in herself, even in ambiguous situations, there is something that she has run away from and forced her to rebuild her entire life from scratch. The only thing that seems to not be up for debate is how soothing it feels to have a large portion of bibimbap and a bottle of makgeolli. In a filmography replete with troubled, hard-to-decipher female protagonists, Iris is amongst the most cryptic of them all.

The film’s main plot – which slowly reveals that Iris is teaching French using a quite unorthodox method to a handful of upper-class women in Seoul, and lives together with a boyfriend who is considerably younger than herself – initially seems to lead to what has become a classical Hong Sang-Soo style narrative triptych (with repetitions of situations, characters and certain lines of dialogue). But the third part abruptly breaks with the format and with the tone. A nostalgic, slightly absurd comedy turns into a drama about morals and cultural differences, as the narrative splits up into two distinctive paths, culminating with a oneiric scene that, to a certain extent, recalls the dream sequence in On the Beach Alone, At Night (2017).

In this sense, the film (which, as with most recent Hong films, features the same handful of recurring actors – Hae-Hyo Kwon, Cho Yunhee, Ha Seong-guk among others) is almost like a commentary on his methods of working, and of the affective response he creates in both characters and spectators: by asking them to participate in an act of translation that, however imperfect or imprecise, creates a deeper emotional connection than other methods, seemingly more intuitive.

But, beyond any sort of formal ping-pong that Hong might be trying his hand at here, the heart of the film lies in this tension between movement and stillness, encapsulated within this idea of wanting to be someone (or something) else. If anything, there is no greater statement that he can make about his cinema – which applies not just to the way he shapes the narrative, but also to the way that he shapes his characters.

Just see his two previous collaborations with Huppert, who is always lovely to see in roles that are against type, that is, easy-going and largely carefree: In Another Country (2012), where she plays three distinct characters imagined by a writer as they fall in love, or Claire’s Camera (2017), where her character’s hobby of taking snapshots invites us (and the other characters) to stop for a moment, to take a little bit of distance, to contemplate. Are they not also ways of expressing this endless desire to become a different person (see also The Novelist’s Film, 2022), which is also the very basis of the actor’s craft? A comforting and soothing film, A Traveler’s Needs is well-deserving of its award – and ranks amongst the best films that the ever-prolific Hong Sang-soo has directed over the last ten years.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.