'The Woman Who Ran': Hong Sang-Soo's Offbeat Film Examines The Textures Of Female Relationships [NYFF Review]

Among the many things suspended during these plague times of social distancing and self-quarantine is the friendly visit, those excursions we take to friends’ houses just to hang out and catch up, exchange banalities and intimacies between sips of wine on the couch. These meetings yield insights of a different nature than those gleaned from eavesdropping, or those extracted from drunken confessions at the bar—who are our friends on their own turfs? Who else will come knocking at their doors? And how do our own lives compare?

READ MORE: NYFF 2020: 12 Most Anticipated Films You Need See

In “The Woman Who Ran,” the latest film by the prolific Korean director, Hong Sang-soo, a married florist visits three friends in the residential outskirts of Seoul. In trademark Hong fashion, the film’s winding, offbeat conversations are conducted in a playful, gently mocking key. And always the keenest of social observers, Hong fills each scene with parallels, coincidences, and behavioral ticks. But this time, in what feels like the beginning of a new era for whom some call the Éric Rohmer of South Korea, he takes interest in the lives of women approaching middle-age. 

Away from her husband for the first time in five years since getting married (or so she claims), Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) is newly exposed to the private lives of old friends. A surveillance motif—CCTV cameras in each friend’s home—parallels Gam-hee’s privileged perspective and the work of introspection that will take place in response. She first visits Young-soon (Seo Young-hwa), a divorcee who lives with a roommate in an area remote enough to breed chickens. The next stop is the posh apartment of pilate instructor Su-Young (Song Seon-mi). The third encounter happens by chance in the lobby of the movie theater where Woo-jin (Kim Sae-byuk), a one-time enemy married to Gan-Mee’s former beau, is now employed. 

READ MORE: 2020 Fall Film Preview: 40 Most Anticipated Films To Watch

Compared to the explosive confrontations in some of Hong’s past films, here there’s a slightly rote sense of propriety and passive aggression, that dictates behavior—a neighbor wants Young-soon and her flatmate to stop feeding the stray cats on account of his wife’s phobia, but the two women resist. Voices never rise above a gentle tone, and the matter is concluded awkwardly—the camera zooms in on one of the strays, who looks straight at the camera right on cue before launching into an enormous yawn. The whole spat seems so terrifically absurd and inconsequential. Life assumes a banal, wistful air when the tumult of youth is far behind you. Or rather, conflict is downplayed, and emotions are muted—Gan-Mee’s marriage is apparently blissful and devoid of conflict, but when probed further her feelings towards her husband come off as subdued: “If I feel love each day it’s enough.” 

The film lacks the formal experimentation in storytelling that distinguishes some of Hong’s more recent work—opting for three visits, one after the other, in three breezy acts. Between each of Gan-Mee’s encounters, Hong’s camera glides towards the mountains in the distance, where a match cut transitions to the new setting. Paired with a charmingly wonky jingle, these transitions mark the passage of time and distance it takes Gan-Mee to get from one place to another. 

Another man—a young lovesick poet— interrupts Gan-Mee’s second visit, but Su-Young sends him away. She admits to sleeping with him one drunken night, but now he won’t get off her back. These unwanted masculine punctuations, all shot with the actors’ backs turned to the camera, seem to drive home the point that men’s opinions and feelings are not important here. In fact, they’re rather silly. Hong isn’t exactly skewering these self-important men by such choices, so much as he’s relegating them to the periphery. The women discuss their love lives or lack thereof in that middle ground between guardedness and full-disclosure, but their chatter ranges from intellectual musings to innocuous, purely random banter—an anecdote about an abusive rooster, the oohs and ahhs of showing off a new coat, for instance. 

Since the start of their ongoing collaboration in 2015 with the twice-told romance, “Right Now, Wrong Then,” Hong and actress Kim Min-hee’s private affairs have come to bear in their work. The couple’s extramarital relationship, the subject of tabloid headlines in Korea, seemed to inspire the jealous intrigue and accusations of infidelity in “The Day After” and “Claire’s Camera.” Meanwhile in “On the Beach at Night Alone,” Kim plays a woman reeling from a messy affair with an older filmmaker—the most obvious reference to the duo’s relationship to date. “The Woman Who Ran,” Hong’s seventh film with Kim, places their scandalous origins firmly in the past. “I hardly even remember it,” says Gam-hee when Woo-jin approaches her at the theater with an apology for her past indiscretions—presumably Woo-jin was once the “other” woman. Foregoing the knotty male-female relationships (and soju bottles) of recent work, Hong examines instead the textures of female relationships and what independence might look and feel like for women entering a new, more mature stage of life—and how a short trip out of one’s comfort zone might generate bounties of food for thought. [B+]

Follow along with the rest of our 2020 New York Film Festival coverage here.