Berlinale 2024: Repetition as Virtue and Folly in A Traveler's Needs

Is repetition boring? To come back to where you began, to place your feet in the prints you have made prior, despite the nourishing, or perhaps, parching journey you had in the interim. I suppose repetition has its limits — how many boomerangs before you collapse? But there is also something reassuring about a return, something South Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s cinema is characterised by or, perhaps, criticised for. His repetitive oeuvre is easy to dismiss because of how prolific he is — 38 films in 28 years. Just last year, he had In Our Day. His films sit easily, are made with little fuss, and feature long shots of people conversing, airily, un-profoundly, yet poignantly. Hong Sangsoo writes the dialogues the morning of or the night before. He builds his story around actors, casting them first and weaving them into his filmography later. His style of shooting is so understated that once, Shin Seok-ho, an actor in Introductions, didn’t even know he was the lead actor until the shoot ended. He shoots them quickly. His latest, A Traveler’s Needs, which premiered at the Berlinale and was a Hong Sangsoo favourite, was shot in 13 days. It shows, for better and worse.

In A Traveler’s Needs Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a mysterious French woman in Seoul, teaches Koreans French, but there is something odd about her pedagogy. There is no textbook. There is no litany of vocabulary to commit to memory. At the heart of her method is the heart. She will speak with her students generously, walk around, ask them probing questions — “What did you feel when you …?” And then, based on their reply, craft a sentence in French that will weave their feeling, but exaggerate it with what we might call French heft. She writes these sentences on index cards and records herself saying them, and they must listen to these words — her words, at the root of which are their feelings — strikes the heart, till the body responds to the language, its tone, its rhythm, and its phonetic affiliations. 

A strange method, one that leans so heavily on the head-heart dichotomy that it is impossible to take seriously, but whose poetry and pathos it is impossible to not be taken by. Poetry often works like that. 

Then, the repetition kicks in. She moves onto her next student, and her moves and swerves — what we thought initially ingenious — begins to feel like a trope, a ploy, a trap. The question forms; is Iris a fraud? We know nothing of her except for her French affectations, her love for sunhats, her strange walk, her cigarettes, and her thirst for Sang Makgeolli, a Korean milky rice wine. Huppert, as though inhabiting this strangeness, has this uneasy intensity, suddenly ripping into laughter, a flirty hand gesture, and an icy retreat. It is impossible to put your finger on her interiority, not because it does not exist, but because it is so beautifully shrouded by her performance. 

The repetition comes from her students, too. After they play music — the first piano, the second guitar — she asks them what they feel, to which they first respond “good” and then “beauty,” referring to the melody, unable to distinguish their musical performance from their music, and then, when further prodded, some semblance of inadequacy. This repetition is painful because it shows, though comically, the impoverishment of expression in new languages and how flat we make ourselves as we enter a new linguistic terrain. To inhabit a new language is to inhabit this stupidity, this vapidity, too, a constant indignity of the being. 

There is, also, something strange about the conversations, mostly in English, where the Koreans latching onto the newness of English is palpable: “You think so?” “I guess” and “I see” — and Huppert’s face does not hint at anything — no annoyance, no wrinkle of being inconvenienced by inarticulation. She, in fact, participates in it, becoming one with their stumbles. She repeats claims they make; they repeat questions she asks, the film lulls. 

But in these returns, the film also blooms into poignance when, like something spiralling outwards — or inwards — returning to the same place but slightly displaced, you are also slightly displaced, and it is in the slightness of it that cinephiles and film programmers stake their joy in his cinema. It is also through this repetition that the question, “Is she a fraud?” begins to fade, numbed by the circulation of dialogue. That it simply does not matter. The point was never to move forward, but to return back. Hong Sangsoo’s lithe unassuming film, then is, if you think about it, a brutal assault on time itself. 

Film Companion’s coverage of Berlinale is made possible by the support of Goethe Mumbai.