Sang-soo -2024-: A Traveler-s Needs- Hong

What emerges is a radical decolonization of the self. Her Korean students—polite, anxious, burdened by unspoken resentments toward their husbands or lovers—come to her expecting practical skills. Instead, she offers them a form of existential permission. She doesn’t correct their French so much as she redirects their souls. In one stunning scene, a student confesses a deep betrayal by her boyfriend. Iris listens, nods, and then asks her to translate the feeling into a sentence about a pebble on a path. The student resists, then complies—and in that translation, something shifts. The pain is not resolved, but it is held . It becomes aesthetic rather than merely wounding. Isabelle Huppert has long been a master of the unreadable face, but here she achieves something new. Iris is not opaque in a menacing or mysterious way—she is opaque in the way a stone or a cat is opaque. She has no backstory we can access. We never learn why she is in Seoul, what she fled, or what she wants beyond the next glass of makgeolli . Huppert plays her with a stillness that borders on the robotic, but punctured by sudden, startling smiles that feel like cracks in a glacier. When she plays her flute in the park, the sound is not beautiful in a conventional sense; it is raw, halting, almost inept. Yet it holds the attention of passersby precisely because it asks for nothing.

This is the film’s central provocation: A Traveler’s Needs proposes that a person’s highest state might be one of sovereign uselessness. Iris is a bad teacher by any measurable standard. She is a bad friend, a bad lover (she has a brief, bewildering sexual encounter with a younger man that seems to satisfy neither of them), and a bad citizen. She does not integrate. She does not even really try. She simply is , and that being becomes a mirror for everyone around her. As always, Hong works with his signature tools: the sudden zoom, the bifurcated narrative structure (here, two nearly identical versions of a final dinner scene, with subtle variations in dialogue and tone), the long, static takes where discomfort blooms into revelation. But the zoom in A Traveler’s Needs feels different. It is no longer ironic or invasive. Instead, it feels tender—as if the camera is leaning in to listen to something so quiet that only a magnified, grainy closeness can catch it. The repetition of scenes, too, serves not to expose the mutability of memory (as in earlier films like Right Now, Wrong Then ), but to suggest that Iris’s reality is not fixed. She drifts between versions of events the way she drifts between park benches. A Traveler-s Needs- Hong Sang-soo -2024-

The final sequence is devastating in its lightness. Iris packs her meager belongings, leaves her flute behind on the bench—a deliberate gift or an act of forgetting, we cannot tell—and walks toward a bus. A child asks her, "Where are you going?" She shrugs, smiles that unfathomable Huppert smile, and says, "I don’t know. Somewhere the way is long." The bus pulls away. The camera holds on the empty bench, the discarded flute, the ordinary Seoul street. And for a long moment, we feel the strange, aching beauty of a life that refuses to be a story. If Hong’s earlier films were about the desperate, comic attempts of men and women to connect over alcohol and art, A Traveler’s Needs is about the radical choice to opt out of the entire economy of connection. Iris does not want to be understood. She does not want to belong. What she wants—and what the film argues is a legitimate human need—is the freedom to be a question without an answer, a traveler without a destination, a melody that never resolves. In an age of relentless self-optimization, productivity, and performative authenticity, Hong Sang-soo has made a film that dares to ask: What if the most revolutionary thing you can do is be useless? What if the deepest need is simply to wander, to drink, to play a little flute, and to leave without saying goodbye? What emerges is a radical decolonization of the self

In the vast, deceptively simple filmography of Hong Sang-soo, a recurring tension has always been the collision between mundane social ritual and the ineffable, chaotic pulse of inner life. With A Traveler’s Needs (2024), Hong, working once again with Isabelle Huppert, distills this tension into its purest, most crystalline form. The result is not just another chapter in his career-long exploration of soju-soaked confessions and fumbled flirtations, but something closer to a philosophical manifesto disguised as a minor-key comedy of manners. She doesn’t correct their French so much as