French, Korean and English. Three are the languages that are heard in The traveler And there is no way to understand each other. It usually happens. That if loneliness, that if incommunication, that if alcohol. Let’s say that Hong Sang-Soo returns to his classics and does so with the help of Isabelle Huppert, one of his best and most brilliant accomplices. As in In another country (2012) and Claire’s camera (2017), the Korean and the French are seen again and they do it as they like: astonishing each other, listening when the other silent and addressing the word exclusively in the wrong language. She gives life to a French teacher who drinks Makgeolli (A white and alcoholic beverage that we have not tried). And drink much better than gives its disastrous language classes. Of student student, repeat rites, fill the same useless cards and, it has already been said, baby. And drink again. And so the day passes between couch, misunderstandings, walks and the Google translator, which helps a lot. Sounds light and, in truth, the film offers a new significance of the lightness itself and freedom that essentially defines Sang-Soo cinema.
Again, we are facing a cinema that feeds on chance, of the arbitrary, of the whim of a life that dictates the scripts the day before the filming in a continuous process of reworking. Always live and always alive. Again, the plot speaks of anguish, heartbreak and even the impossibility of becoming understood. Again, the action is nothing more than the movement of an endless conversation in a prosaic scenario in which alcohol abounds, spontaneous philosophy and melancholy. And yet, and as always (that is, again) everything is indecipherable. The relevant thing is how each gesture supposedly uncompromising ends up drawing the precise profile of the hidden, the non-diachous, the invisible or, this time, the intraduible that configures everything evident, what is said, the visible or the only understandable thing.
Let’s say that the film does not have the light and at the time deep gravity of the best of the endless Sang-Soo (after this there are two more films to be released), but yes Recover and renew the very essence of a cinema built from the most absolute freedom. Far from the brilliant methanarrative games that the director likes so much, already distance from that twilight languishness that hurts so much, now everything is resolved in a game, in a confusion, in a translation error. Brilliant, but, let’s admit it, so tiny that it brushes the absence. It is enjoyed with the same ease that a dream of those that we do not understand why we have forgotten is forgotten.
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Director: Hong Sang-Soo. Interpreters: Isabelle Huppert, Lee Hye-Young, Kwon Hae-Hyo, Cho Yun-Hee. Duration: 90 minutes. Nationality: South Korea.
