Isabelle Huppert, who recently had her 71st birthday in last month, is one of the most interesting movie actresses I have ever seen. With that consistently distinctive persona of hers, she has steadily fascinated and impressed us for more than 50 years, and now she entertains us again in South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s new film “A Traveler’s Needs”, which incidentally won the Grand Jury Prize when it was premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival early in this year.

Here in this film, Huppert plays an elusive middle-aged French woman who goes through a rather eventful day in one neighborhood area of Seoul. On the surface, this French lady is simply enjoying some life in Seoul while supposedly working as a private French tutor, but neither the movie nor she reveals that much about who she actually is, and that is where Huppert brings her own magic. Effortlessly exuding her own charm and charisma, she makes her opaque character interesting to observe to the end, and Hong certainly provides his own comic moments to support his lead actress.

The first act of the movie opens with the meeting between Huppert’s character and a young South Korean lady. After casually talking with each other in English for a while, the young South Korean lady demonstrates a bit of her piano performance skill, but Huppert seems to be more occupied with something else as she goes out to the balcony of her young pupil’s residence, and her young pupil keeps playing the piano in the meantime.

Some time later, Huppert throws a few seemingly serious questions on how her young pupil felt about her performance. Although she stumbles a bit as trying to articulate what she exactly felt at that time, her young pupil manages to give the answers, and Huppert writes down her answers on notes in French. When they subsequently go outside, Huppert asks about how her young pupil feels about a certain object they happen to come across, and, again, she writes down the answers on notes in French.

In the end, Huppert gives her young pupil what she wrote in French. According to her, one can learn a foreign language better via trying to speak what feels close to one’s heart first, and her pupil seems to believe in this rather unorthodox method while also showing some gratitude via a little tuition from her. I cannot say whether this teaching method can be really effective, but I must say that I was constantly amused by how Huppert delightfully handles this amusing moment under Hong’s unadorned but smooth direction.

The second part of the movie is more or less than a variation of the first part, and Huppert visits a middle-aged couple introduced to her via the mother of her young pupil. Because she happens to like a South Korean rice wine named “makgeolli” a lot, she and the couple later come to have a little drinking time together, and that reminded me again that it is not so recommendable for any alcoholic performer to collaborate with Hong (I heard that he often made his performers drink in front of the camera, by the way).

And I was also reminded of that simple but sublime moment of Huppert drinking a bottle of soju, another South Korean alcoholic beverage, alone in Hong’s previous film “In Another Country” (2012). As he did in that charmingly enjoyable film, Hong finds some rich humor from how his South Korean characters clumsily interact with Huppert in English, and that becomes all the amusing for me and other South Korean audiences when Huppert is later introduced to a famous poem from one of the most famous South Korean poets of the 20th century.

Around the last act, things get a little more serious as Huppert comes to show a bit of her character’s private life in Seoul. It turns out that she has been in a romantic relationship in a younger man, and she is willing to give him some financial help via that little tuition earned by her, though we are not so sure about whether she really loves him or not.

Our doubt on that aspect of hers is increased more when someone makes an unexpected visit to that young man’s residence. I will not go into details for not spoiling any of your entertainment, but I can tell you instead that what follows next is surprisingly tense, and you will even be surprised by a brief but striking moment of jump cut, which certainly stands out in contrast to Hong’s usually laid-back handling of story and characters.

Although you may scratch your head a bit due to the rather ambiguous ending, Huppert will still hold your attention as usual as freely bouncing along with the movie, and she is also supported well by several South Korean performers including Lee Hye-young, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee, Ha Seong-guk, and Kim Seung-yoon. Like Huppert, most of them worked with Hong more than once, and they surely know how to handle those dryly humorous moments in the film while ably supporting Huppert as required.

Overall, “A Traveler’s Need”, which is incidentally Hong’s 31st feature film, is one of his more enjoyable films during last several years besides being one of the better South Korean movies of this year. He seemed to be spinning wheels in his two previous films “In Water” (2023) and “In Our Day” (2023), but he is back in element here, and I certainly hope that he will collaborate with Huppert again someday.