Review: The Woman Who Ran Is a Heady Portrait of Lives Defined by Absences

The film suggests Hong Sang-soo’s fantasy of how women discuss him when he’s not around.

The Woman Who Ran
Photo: Cinema Guild

Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran is defined by absences: by who isn’t in the frame and by what isn’t said throughout conversations that appear to be determinedly trivial. Returning to Seoul after years away, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) reconnects with a trio of female friends, and they talk of the food they eat and indulge in local gossip, repeating observations with a fervor that feels obsessive and mindless, as if these women have gotten too calcified in their own lives to utter anything but mantras. Yet Hong and his actors communicate the disappointment and sadness that’s being suppressed by well-practiced politeness, offering anecdotes that abound in pointed loose ends. Throughout, you may recall that audacious sequence in Grass in which a woman repeatedly went up and down a flight of stairs, as Hong fashions a similar yet subtler portrait of stasis with his latest.

The film doesn’t open on Gam-hee, but on a group of caged chickens that belong to someone living next door to Young-soon (Seo Young-hwa), the first person whom Gam-hee visits. Those chickens are never seen again, but they seem to offer a metaphor for entrapment (like the stairs in Grass), which is counterpointed with a lovely idyllic shot of Young-soon working in her yard. We’re seeing embodiments of both the compromises and gifts of settling into a routine yet fairly prosperous life. Young-soon appears to be among the happier characters in the film, yet she speaks to Gam-hee in a halting fashion—perhaps still haunted by the filmmaker husband she left, who she says has grown too successful, and who’s later paralleled with another successful man, a writer (Kwon hae-hyo) from Gam-hee’s past.

Strange moments periodically explode The Woman Who Ran’s carefully cultivated sense of mystery and tension. One of Young-soon’s sources of respite—a group of alley cats she feeds with her roommate—is casually threatened by a man (Shin Seok-ho) who’s moved into a neighboring apartment, insisting that Young-soon stop feeding the cats because his wife is afraid of them. Young-soon and the man are each studiously polite, yet the scene grows intangibly, comically hostile with each uttering of a platitude, merging passive-aggression and potential violence in a fashion that’s reminiscent of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

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In a wonderful grace note, one of the cats, a beautiful little fat furball, quietly surveys the argument in the back of the frame, radiating a dignified, slightly surreal benevolence that suggests a Miyazaki creation. Like the chickens, the cat is never seen again—its existence only fleetingly glimpsed, and which we must leave behind, as our guide, Gam-hee, moves on to other visitations, to other lives that clearly have dimensions we can never access. The Woman Who Ran is structured as a series of loose, brief, jagged, occasionally intertwined strands, each one abounding in piercing, fleeting physical gestures. Hong can offer more information with a fraught two-shot than many directors can with an expansive master shot.

Men are an ongoing source of anxiety in the film, whose title could refer to Gam-hee, who’s on a holiday from a husband she claims to have been inseparable from for five years—a statistic that sounds more false and self-justifying every time we hear it. But the title could also refer to Young-soon, or to Gam-hee’s other two friends, Su-young (Song Seon-mi), who brutally discards a former lover in her apartment hallway in another prolonged moment of seriocomic agony, and Woo-jin (Kim sae-byuk), who appears to be retreating from the swelling ego of the writer from Gam-hee’s past, whom she controversially married years ago. Many Hong films examine romantic pressures from the POV of a surrogate for the director himself, while The Woman Who Ran suggests Hong’s fantasy of how women discuss him when he’s not around.

The men of The Woman Who Ran are clueless and selfish, yet they arouse an anger in the women that serves to reveal the emotions that the latter obscure from their friends. Hong invests this ironic, despairing theme with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life. In the film’s final image, Gam-hee sits in a theater watching a movie that could be Hong’s On the Beach at Night Alone, enraptured by tranquil images that suggest a reassuring world. Art allows us to experience empathy and beauty easily, without the challenge of cross-motivations, baggage, and insecurities. In art, we don’t have to truly wrestle with the principle of everyone having their reasons.

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Score: 
 Cast: Kim Min-hee, Seo Young-hwa, Song Seon-mi, Kim Sae-byuk, Lee Eun-mi, Kwon Hae-hyo, Shin Seok-ho, Ha Seong-guk  Director: Hong Sang-soo  Screenwriter: Hong Sang-soo  Distributor: Cinema Guild  Running Time: 77 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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