Who is the woman who ran? It couldn’t be Gam-hee (played by Hong Sang-soo’s partner and regular leading actor, Kim Min-hee), who on a brief excursion outside Seoul to see old friends, assures everyone she encounters that she’s happily married. Her husband is on a short trip and so she has decided to strike out on her own for a few days to say hello. In fact, in their five years of marriage, this is her first time apart from him, even for a single day. She shares her husband’s belief that “people in love should always stick together” more than once, with a smile. But does she believe it? Throughout Hong’s latest film, which is structured around conversations between Gam-hee and the women she visits (or runs into), she will speak in very little detail about her own life or her husband, and when she does, it’s hardly with impassioned enthusiasm.
First, she stays with Young-soon (Seo Younghwa), a middle-aged divorcee relishing her independence and life with a younger roommate. After a pleasant afternoon catch-up and meal together, a new neighbour interrupts the proceedings to complain to Young-soon’s roomie about their routine of feeding stray cats which has caused them to gather and keep his feline-phobic partner from venturing outside. They stubbornly, yet in hilariously polite demeanour, refuse to abide. The sequence ends with a token Hong zoom on one of said cats, who yawns into the camera, blissfully unaware of this debate regarding its livelihood. Another neighbourly disturbance occurs in the evening when Gam-hee is frightened to see, via a CCTV monitor, a ghostly young woman seated outside the home. Young-soon explains that she is the neighbour’s twenty-something daughter, whose mother had recently taken off (The woman who ran? Or just one of several?). Gam-hee stays inside and watches on the monitor as Young-soon comforts the young woman.
From there she stops off to see Su-young (Song Seon-mi), a pilates instructor and dance performance producer, who has done quite well for herself, earning a solid living and scoring a lovely apartment in part by taking advantage of its male owner’s admiration. Their conversation is also interrupted by a strange man on a doorstep, this time the object of a regrettable one-night stand. As Su-young tries to shoo him off, Gam-hee again gazes at the drama inside via CCTV, as she continues her voyeuristic tour of other women’s lives.
Like the man complaining about the cats, he is framed from behind. We only briefly glimpse his face, with the woman, front-facing, standing her ground. A third man will appear in the film’s final moments, depicted in the same formal strategy. All of Hong’s films, to some degree, explore contrasts between his male and female characters, but each take varying positions of masculine versus feminine points-of-view. The Woman Who Ran unfolds as a triptych, pairing Gam-hee with different women who briefly share their lives with her and stand in some implied solidarity, not simply against the men-at-the-door, but in their efforts to carve out their own paths. The third of these encounters is unplanned (or is it?) and presents a possible set of clues as to why Gam-hee may be a woman on the run after all.
In a succinct series of scenes, moving between discussions of marriage, divorce, how beautiful cow eyes are, an alpha rooster tormenting chickens, the right to feed hungry kitties, one-night stands, to the nuisance of small-time celebrity, Hong renders the most amusing dialogues and revelations about private lives and peripheral dramas with an equally soft touch as the film oscillates, in brilliant subtlety, between the humourous and the serious, divulging key character details along the way.
One of the most prolific working directors, Hong’s films, sometimes coming out at a rate of more than one per year, would risk blurring into one another if it weren’t for their distinguishing minute details. Comparable to Eric Rohmer, or Phillipe Garrel as a contemporary, Hong likewise works repeatedly within familiar frameworks, reconfiguring his soju melodramas with capable women and needy, sensitive men (often filmmakers) in different states of romantic crisis. In fact, each of Hong’s recent films have all taken pointedly different approaches to structure, tone and character. The variation of detail between each are deceptively rich and while their quietness doesn’t beg for close scrutiny, there are few filmmakers whose work will reward its viewers more for their attention.
Indeed, The Woman Who Ran is one of his most deceptively quiet works yet, easily mistakable for being in a minor key. Shot in colour by DP Kim Sumin (Hong’s films alternate from black and white), Woman’s colour palette matches its gentle tone. Bright whites, foliage, pastel interiors and the occasional misty views of the surrounding mountainous landscape, the film’s mise en scène is borderline therapeutic in its enveloping calm. And yet, a mystery boils beneath. And so do the alluded dramas of its ensemble and the unarticulated interiority of its protagonist, which slowly inches toward revealing itself before stopping just short. While its surface appears to be light and warm, The Woman Who Ran shares with Hong’s recent work a distinct melancholy, one that manifests more overtly in one revealing gesture of “escape” when the protagonist takes refuge in the comfort of a cinema.
Its wall-to-wall conversations on relationships and settled-in adulthood expose Gam-hee to both a feminine independence that her friends have cultivated and a certain resignation to the course of life. The film’s intrigue comes from these vague implications as well as that which remains unspoken. Taking a linear direction with its narrative, Hong departs from his typical structural playfulness in which timelines unpredictably overlap, converge, diverge, remix, and fold into themselves, and yet finds new ways to play with storytelling through a network of unseen pasts and off-screen realities. In its breezy 77-minutes, The Woman Who Ran accumulates a multitude of hinted-at stories and happenings, of lives that have arrived at their own unique stages. Hong is a master of weaving together complexities so nonchalantly that they graze the viewer, almost unnoticed.
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