In terms of story and especially structure, The Woman Who Ran sneaks up on the viewer when least expected. On the surface, the movie is a simple one, chronicling a weekend trip taken by Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) to her hometown as her first time spent away from her unseen husband in their five years together. The screenplay divides the action into three vignettes, each one following her visit to someone who was once important to her, before the life of drudgery she now leads. Each vignette builds upon the last one, so that we get the sense that these are the three people with whom Gam-hee was always meant to reunite, in order of importance. Everything seems straightforward in this story, written and directed by Hong Sang-soo with his usual sense of performing a casual magic trick.
As ever with Hong, it will be for those with an acquainted understanding of his style, which is deliberately low-key and relaxed in even its most heightened moments. The prolific director is up to something curious here, though, and one moment, seemingly unconnected to the central plot (such as it is), communicates this quite well. Young-ji (Lee Eun-mi), who lives with one of the women visited by Gam-hee, answers the door when a neighbor comes to complain about stray cats (or “robber cats,” as the man calls them) being fed by Young-ji and Young-soon (Seo Young-hwa). He wants the cats to abandon the neighborhood for the sake of his wife. She believes the cats must be fed, and now that they expect to be fed, they would starve otherwise.
For Hong, the point isn’t the moral debate ― which, in any case, boils down very simply to whether one values cats or humans ― but how the scene begins in one state of being and ends on an emotional U-turn, all without cutting away from the conversation taking place. This simple but potent choice defines nearly every sequence that surrounds this particular one, which does not feature Gam-hee at all. Another similar sequence is telling, too, in which Su-young (Song Seon-mi), the second of Gam-hee’s visitations, is herself visited by the much younger man she used to date. He is almost certainly unwelcome at her home, which she makes clear, but something ties these seemingly unrelated moments to each other: The men are faced away from the camera.
Rarely do we ever see a man straight-on here, and eventually, that decision could reflect Gam-hee’s attitude toward the entire sex for reasons that are not revealed until the penultimate scene. In it, having finally bumped into Woo-jin (Kim Sae-byuk) by happenstance at a movie arthouse, she confronts the man with whom she was once involved, before he left her for Woo-jin. He’s a big-time director now, with a picture being presented at the theater. Did Gam-hee come for this exact encounter to occur?
She repeatedly claims that this visit was a long time coming, but her life has left her feeling unfulfilled. The proof is in how little she has to say about her life beyond the fact that her husband is on a work trip and that she opted not to go. And so she finds herself where she once lived, visiting three women whose importance to her is, if not entirely clear, keenly felt. First is Young-soon, who finds herself surprised by Gam-hee’s altered appearance and marital circumstance. Second is Su-young, who wonders what love could possibly mean when it goes sour. Finally, there is Woo-jin, who regrets her betrayal of Gam-hee’s confidence but does not regret the life it has led to.
Each of these performances is strategically blank until the character’s truth is revealed, and Hong’s approach is similarly strategic in terms of style. In the middle of some sequences, seemingly upon a shift from cordial pleasantries to something more personal and open in the conversations, the director will abandon a static medium shot of two characters talking and adopt close-ups of the actors’ profiles, moving back and forth between the two. Like everything else in The Woman Who Ran, the choice is simple but effective at communicating the fragile emotional territory into which we are entering.
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