Our Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning French actress is starring in the new Hong Sang-soo tomorrow.
It's been a long time since Isabelle Huppert played anything other than Isabelle Huppert in the role of Isabelle Huppert. The immense actress, more attentive to her “image” than to her acting (she really has nothing left to prove), has for a long time chosen to risk herself in films which would be nothing without her, and in which she projects herself as in a mirror named Isabelle Huppert. After Another Country et Claire's Camerathe South Korean Hong Sang-soo offers his services for the third time. Subscribed to the Berlinale awards, we must believe that it brings him luck: he left in 2024 with a double prize – Silver Bear and Grand Jury Prize.
We are always a little afraid of being bored in this type of arthouse cinema with its minimalist style. But no: we let ourselves be caught in the game of this fragile, almost inconsistent plot, yet inhabited by a strange poetic thickness. Iris (Madame Huppert, therefore), freshly arrived in Seoul, penniless and without speaking a word of Korean (we won't know any more), gives private French lessons in English, her teaching method does not consisting of transcribing onto a piece of paper the translation of the emotions confided to him, at the moment, by his student-interlocutors, who are subsequently invited to reread and memorize these short texts to gradually become familiar with the language.
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Sensitive approach, which leaves her “clients” somewhat intrigued, but Iris believes in it, and knows how to be persuasive. Accommodated with one of her young students (in adoration before her), the solitary traveler, paradoxically discreet and intrusive, will, despite herself, collide, through her presence, with the difficult relationship of a mother, on a surprise visit, for the first time, in the small studio where his student son lives… We will be careful not to spoil here the content of this sequence of which Iris/Huppert is the trigger… The film is entirely based on the mystery of these imponderables of everyday life, in the singularly landscape peaceful neighborhood of the Korean capital.
-The Traveler. Film by Hong Sangsoo. With Isabelle Huppert. South Korea, France, color, 2024. Duration: 1h30.
In theaters January 22, 2025
