Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a mysterious French woman and her often absent crazy cat world, is the absolute protagonist of the new film by South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, A Traveler's Need, in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.
In the sign of an exasperated minimalism, of a cinematographic language close to zero, we see this woman who no one knows where she comes from, sitting on a park bench playing with a toy recorder.
Without money or means to support herself, she finds herself teaching French.
And she does it, in her own way.
So she ends up having two Korean women as students with whom she engages in Babel-like conversations (between English, Korean and French) typical of Hong cinema.
But Iris also likes to walk barefoot, lie on the dirt or rocks, and rely on makgeolli (Korean rice wine) to find some of the comfort she seems to be denied.
"In fact, it is very difficult to project yourself into a story like this in which there is no role or even a real story - says a splendid all black Huppert in Berlin -. But at the end of the day you discover that you were really a character and that the film you made says a lot about loneliness and how someone can escape it in order to live simply and connect with other people like Iris does. So I think that A Traveler's Need - continues the actress - really makes a sort of philosophical statement about what it means to be alive. Not only that, about what it means to be a human being, to be alone and to be together."
"Every morning Hong distributes a very detailed script and it is very, very difficult because you have so many lines to memorize in such a short time - says Huppert - but this is another thing that I like about his cinema because it is the least as improvised as you can imagine. It's all written down. It's all very precise."
And he concludes: "All this, his methods make me think deeply about the meaning of cinema, make me remember how it can be so vast and also so small. He manages to preserve both the power and the charm of cinema while working almost alone. It's fascinating."
In fact, in addition to writing and directing the film, Hong Sangsoo was responsible for the soundtrack, editing and production.
The film is also the third time that French acting icon Isabelle Huppert stars with this Korean director, after Claire's Camera and In Another Country.
In addition to Huppert, A Traveler's Needs also stars Lee Hyeyoung and Kwon Haehyo, who previously appeared in Hong's Walk Up, The Novelist's Film and In Front of Your Face.
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