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‘A Traveler’s Needs’ Review: Hong Sangsoo and Isabelle Huppert Reunite for an Airy, Enigmatic Afternoon Ramble
In 'A Traveler's Needs,' Hong Sangsoo and Isabelle Huppert sketch out the barest outline of a character adrift in a foreign land.
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. And so Hong Sangsoo’s latest short, shimmery comedy of the elusive human condition begins its game-playing, inviting the audience to fill in its blanks with the assumptions and judgments we typically make of strangers or superficial acquaintances — and offering us no eventual scoresheet whatsoever for our guesswork. Some of the film’s loveliest scenes show Iris contentedly alone, eating bibimbap in a quiet café or — alcohol of course being the lifeblood of this director’s cinema — getting woozily drunk on makgeolli, the milky rice wine that has drawn out some rich confessions in Hongs past, but here induces a soft calm.
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