I’ve not seen any of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s work – he’s made like over twenty moderately budgeted movies – before The Woman Who Ran (2020), which appealed to me because it was available on SBS On Demand and it was only 77 minutes long. The first thing I can say: zooms. A camera zoom usually doesn’t call attention to itself in contemporary cinema, unless it’s like a slow zoom in an art movie, or a whip-pan ‘kung-fu movie’ style joke. In The Woman Who Ran, when a zoom first appears, it seems accidental or amateurish. We watch two characters talk in a master shot, and then the camera abruptly shifts and reframes through a zoom for a closer shot. Sang-soo’s camerawork redefines what we think of when it comes to a subtle zoom, often emphasising a point in a conversation or offering a sublime button to the point of a scene (witness the brilliant zoom on a cat). Overall, The Woman Who Ran also redefines what a movie should be – why shouldn’t a movie just be friends catching up and hanging out? That’s often the stuff of life, isn’t it? Sitting on a couch, eating some food, having a chat. My focus on the zoom overemphasises its use; the film’s visual focus is mainly master shots of lengthy conversations. We follow Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee, from The Handmaiden) as a wife who has not been separated from her husband at any point for the last five years. This information is relayed a few times and the relationship is positive. While the husband is away on a business trip, Gam-hee catches up with three women, old friends, one at a time: the reserved Young-ji (Young-hwa Seo), the artistic Su-young (Song Seon-mi), and the circumspect Woo-jin (Kim Sae-byuk). In each meeting, we hear about their place, how they’re going in their lives, and we observe how Gam-hee reacts, and observes them, and talks about her own life, only gradually revealing some more about her past by the very end. I really liked the patient and casual style of Sang-soo’s film, how these everyday conversations, catching up with someone we haven’t seen in awhile, can’t help but measure where people are and how they handle themselves. The women are filmed sitting across or next to each other openly, and when men appear, we often see them with their back to the camera, and their appearances tend to be obtrusions in different ways. I look forward to exploring more of Sang-soo’s work after this small delight. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 