A TRAVELER’S NEEDS
여행자의 필요
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Kwon Haehyo, Lee Hyeyoung
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo
BY THE STREAM
수유천
**½/****
starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo
by Walter Chaw At this point, it’s not that one watches a Hong Sang-soo joint so much as one sits with it companionably, like a chaperoned Victorian date, a slightly alcoholic drink in hand to lubricate the passage of unpredictable chunks of awkward chit-chat. Free of exposition or any narrative of consequence, his stuff is just suggestions of hints of scenarios given to his cast of regulars; then Master Hong sits back to watch how the various elements fall into place. There’s occasional magic among the literal obfuscations (one of his 2023 films, In Water, was shot entirely out of focus on purpose), those tiny sparks between people that define human attraction and other sundry frictions. You’re paying such close attention that a hitch of breath or glint in the eye can feel like revolutionary insight. More, you’re so desperate for meaning that you will attach it to gossamer inference, a will-o-the-wisp made of listlessness and… Is it boredom? It’s not free of boredom.
A Traveler’s Needs, the 31st of Hong’s 32 features since 1996 (his style actually suggests he’s far less prolific than he could be), stars Isabelle Huppert as Iris–like the flower, or the diaphragm of a camera or an eye, or the gimmick that opens James Bond pictures. She’s a multitude, a mystery to most of the people she meets over the course of this trifle: the receptacle of their expressions of art and interrogator of their ineffable feelings caught in the creation of the same. You could say this is Hong as artist-philosopher, looking for the source waters of his inspiration. I suspect it’s more Hong presenting the question and asking his actors to do the work for him, like a tenured professor edging past usefulness but surrounded by hungry students inspired by the ghost of what he used to be. Iris floats through A Traveler’s Needs, tiny and weightless, the muse as pixie speaking in Francophone English as a procession of “French students” hauls out their dusty musical instruments to perform for her pleasure. When they’re done, she asks–the worst audience there ever was–what they were feeling while they were playing.
This is a tough question to answer in the best circumstances, but Hong presses his Korean cast to improvise responses in halting, sometimes tortured English. There’s a trilling perversity to it on the one hand, an arch, sly invitation to the audience to ponder Hong’s methods on the other. Is he saying that some things are inexpressible in any language? Is he offering a version of that homily about writing about music being akin to dancing about architecture? It’s a nice thought, though I doubt it. I think Hong derives pleasure from placing his casts in inescapably uncomfortable scenarios. He’s trapping them on camera and nodding sagely in encouragement when every scene trails off into awkward tittering and the way people repeat nonsense noises while trying to speak a language they barely know. Hong has become Werner Herzog. He gives people who trust him impossible assignments and watches them struggle like bugs skewered on pins, pinioned there for an entomologist’s love of them. Get Isabelle Huppert to ask a young Korean man in halting English what is the sound of one hand clapping and watch unblinking for 10 minutes as he repeats a question he wouldn’t even understand in his native tongue, then answers it with a series of embarrassed gestures and head scratches. I would hazard that this film’s title is the same sort of Conan the Barbarian koan. Though Hong is revered for his “naturalism,” I propose that his movies are, at this point, whatever the opposite of that is.
Consequently, I appreciated a scene in the middle of A Traveler’s Needs where a young man (Ha Seong-guk) who has offered the itinerant Iris a place to stay is dressed down by his mother for getting Harold & Maude-ed. “Who is she? Your mother?” she asks him, and it occurs to me that this is the only really human interaction in the entire picture. A French teacher? Only ever in the sense that she is both French and a teacher, like Kane was a teacher, walking the Earth with a pocketful of fortune cookies. I liked, too, when Iris’s first student (Yunhee Cho), after much grilling and misunderstanding, finally says that what she was feeling was judged and found lacking. I worry that every review of every movie Hong makes from now on will be coloured by that fear that if you don’t like it, you don’t like “real,” you prefer “fake” and are therefore less morally and intellectually developed. I would offer that experimental film was never about trying to frustrate with a wilful lack of meaning. Maybe I’m too unevolved to understand when I’m being patronized.
There’s a whiff of meaning in Hong’s second film of 2024, By the Stream, in which he is reunited with his partner in life and crime, Kim Min-hee, and his favoured alter ego, Kwon Hae-hyo. There is more than a hint of Woody Allen in Hong’s process: autobiography mixed with grievance, sexual desire confused with artistic ambition, all capped by an extraordinary megalomania that the hyperbolic maxim of happily listening to a favourite artist read the phone book applies to him. Maybe it does. Kwon’s Sieon represents two of Hong’s pet projections of himself: he’s a fading actor of some lingering acclaim and a bookstore owner who is courted by his niece, Joenim (Kim), to take on a mentor role with four of her acting students. Sieon has been laid low because of his genuine and outspoken nature. The more you know about the scandal that once attended Hong’s partnership with Kim, the more these self-pitying scenarios carry the taint of apologia and martyrdom. Joenim introduces her uncle to her boss, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), a long-time admirer of his work, and she is instantly smitten. I realized how flirtation in Hong’s films feels like the sexual role-playing in long-term relationships. There’s the contrivance of innocence when Jeong declares how “fit” Sieon has remained after all this time out of the spotlight–the awkward coquettishness of routine sexual partners playing at taboo. “Maybe you should buy me a drink!” she says swoonily, to Jeonim’s irritation, and now there’s a different kind of sexual deviance being hinted at.
Late in By the Stream (of memory? Of time?), master Sieon, amid another round of Hong’s beloved bougie sparkly rice wine makgeolli, gets his quartet of new admirers to go long on what is most important to them in life. In turn, they offer paths to happiness: finding one small light and guarding it with one’s life until death, for instance, or having one day of true love with a person they might love truly. Sieon is an acting teacher the way Iris is a French teacher–insinuating, often inebriated, and addicted to disarming others through intimacy that’s uninvited and, once initiated, unwelcome. I should say they are both teachers in the way Hong sees himself as a teacher: a provocateur, a gadfly, increasingly in it for the gratification of having the power and reputation to get people to work out his kink while he watches. He is an archivist of ordinary thoughts, an archaeologist of common domestic sites where nothing extraordinary ever happens and people of no great insight wonder for the first time about the mysterious functions of the heart, theirs and others’. I have loved many of Hong’s films. I’m grateful for the journey so far. But this is my stop. Next one’s on me.
