Like makgeolli — Korea’s unique fizzy, fermented, cloudy-white rice wine — the films of director Hong Sang-soo are an acquired taste. Fortunately for him, many film programmers at repertory houses and festivals beyond South Korea love the peculiar handmade, improvisational flavor of his work, with its complicated emotional entanglements and near primitive levels of craftsmanship. The last feature of his to premiere at the Berlinale, In Water, wasn’t even in focus, although Hong insists that was deliberate, to reflect the fuzziness of its creatively blocked film director protagonist.
Thankfully, his latest, A Traveler’s Needs, a competitor for the Golden Bear this year, is not only in focus, it’s also rather watchable, even for diehard Hong-skeptics. Partly that’s thanks to the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the lead role (her third collaboration with Hong, after In Another Country and Claire’s Camera), playing Iris, a mysterious Frenchwoman with eccentric habits.
Thankfully, his latest, A Traveler’s Needs, a competitor for the Golden Bear this year, is not only in focus, it’s also rather watchable, even for diehard Hong-skeptics. Partly that’s thanks to the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the lead role (her third collaboration with Hong, after In Another Country and Claire’s Camera), playing Iris, a mysterious Frenchwoman with eccentric habits.
- 2/22/2024
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Hong Sang-soo is known for a slow-paced filmmaking style that studies everyday situations through an almost peculiar minimalism. His nonchalant characters always seem to make way for intimate moments of connection, offering the patient viewer experiences of unexpected warmth. Still, his abstruse style can set up a project to fail, with conversations fading within a series of ellipses and momentum diminishing in what feels like a wholly improvised exercise. This is mainly the case with A Traveler’s Need, a half-hearted story about a French woman in Korea which seems to resemble an odd comedy sketch on most occasions.
In her third collaboration with the Korean filmmaker, Isabelle Huppert plays Iris, a wandering French woman with no past and few worries. We open as she converses with Isong (Kim Seungyun), a shy young woman who answers the protagonist's questions about her piano playing. Huppert's lines feel stiff from the get-go,...
In her third collaboration with the Korean filmmaker, Isabelle Huppert plays Iris, a wandering French woman with no past and few worries. We open as she converses with Isong (Kim Seungyun), a shy young woman who answers the protagonist's questions about her piano playing. Huppert's lines feel stiff from the get-go,...
- 2/21/2024
- by Sergiu Inizian
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Iris, the petite enigma at the center of “A Traveler’s Needs,” dresses at once to be noticed, and to disappear. Over a bright sundress, spattered all over with red and violet blossoms, she wears a cardigan of a most assertive, eye-searing green. It’s the grassy hue, in fact, of green-screen backdrops, as we notice when she fades into the foliage of a city park in full summer leaf, or is consumed by the paint job of a tennis court-like roof terrace. Nobody knows exactly where she has come from, beyond the clue of her thick French accent, and even she seems uncertain as to where she’s going: One imagines her, with that effects-friendly knitwear, being dropped into any number of imagined locations, and looking just as out of place as she does on the streets of Seoul.
But Iris is played, with typically curt, quizzical good humor, by Isabelle Huppert,...
But Iris is played, with typically curt, quizzical good humor, by Isabelle Huppert,...
- 2/19/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
While we all know that making a film is quite an undertaking, this is even more true when we are talking about the feature you direct. Many directors often become quite critical and even embarrassed at times talking about their first time in the directing chair, focusing on the issues which define this very first effort, which above all tells the story of someone who still had a lot to learn. If we ignore the nostalgia for a moment, it is also a decisive step, often linked to many fears and truths which we are not ready for, especially regarding the future we have planned for ourselves. In his latest endeavour “In Water”, South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo tells a story dealing with these issues, about a group of young people trying to make their first movie, which is also about a tale about the purpose of art, for ourselves...
- 11/11/2023
- by Rouven Linnarz
- AsianMoviePulse
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