In A Traveler’s Needs Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a mysterious French woman in Seoul, teaches Koreans French, but there is something odd about her pedagogy. There is no textbook. There is no litany of vocabulary to commit to memory. At the heart of her method is the heart. She will speak with her students generously, walk around, ask them probing questions — “What did you feel when you …?” And then, based on their reply, craft a sentence in French that will weave their feeling, but exaggerate it with what we might call French heft. She writes these sentences on index cards and records herself saying them, and they must listen to these words — her words, at the root of which are their feelings — strikes the heart, till the body responds to the language, its tone, its rhythm, and its phonetic affiliations.
A strange method, one that leans so heavily on the head-heart dichotomy that it is impossible to take seriously, but whose poetry and pathos it is impossible to not be taken by. Poetry often works like that.
Then, the repetition kicks in. She moves onto her next student, and her moves and swerves — what we thought initially ingenious — begins to feel like a trope, a ploy, a trap. The question forms; is Iris a fraud? We know nothing of her except for her French affectations, her love for sunhats, her strange walk, her cigarettes, and her thirst for Sang Makgeolli, a Korean milky rice wine. Huppert, as though inhabiting this strangeness, has this uneasy intensity, suddenly ripping into laughter, a flirty hand gesture, and an icy retreat. It is impossible to put your finger on her interiority, not because it does not exist, but because it is so beautifully shrouded by her performance.
The repetition comes from her students, too. After they play music — the first piano, the second guitar — she asks them what they feel, to which they first respond “good” and then “beauty,” referring to the melody, unable to distinguish their musical performance from their music, and then, when further prodded, some semblance of inadequacy. This repetition is painful because it shows, though comically, the impoverishment of expression in new languages and how flat we make ourselves as we enter a new linguistic terrain. To inhabit a new language is to inhabit this stupidity, this vapidity, too, a constant indignity of the being.