La Femme qui s'est enfuie

I remember once generalising that any film that takes three hours to tell its story can't really be that good. Of course, such generalisations are rubbish; films are as good or as bad as they are whether they are ten minutes long or ten hours but there's something to be said for 'the miniature'. Little films can be beautifully polished gems and there are many small films of seventy-five minutes or so that you wish would go on forever.

Sang-soo Hong's "The Woman who Ran" is one such film. It's a conversation piece and there's a lot of small talk but it's so beautifully directed and acted you feel a sense of privilege just being with these people and these people are mostly female friends, or maybe just acquaintances, spending time together. When a man makes an early appearance, in a terrifically written and very funny single take sequence, he seems something of an intruder but Hong has so much fun with the scene he makes for a very welcome intruder. Mostly, however, it's just women talking about their lives, the men in their lives, their pasts and the pleasure or otherwise of eating meat and I wish it could have gone on for another hour or so.

HSS loves to come at it sideways. This movie opens in the morning to a batch of chooks, whose owner is going for a job interview, and neighbour Young-soon wishes her well. Is the interview successful? An evening CCTV shot is a clue.

But visiting Young-soon is Gam-hee, who tells us repeatedly she's "never apart" from her new husband, a translator. Except, it's his idea, not hers.

The two pals hold an absurdist lunch conversation about the nature of eating meat, while another Young-soon neighbour begs her to stop feeding the local cats. This meta-conversation bats back and forth. The cat steals the scene.

Gam-hee's next visitee Su-young is also interrupted by an annoying bloke, a self-important poet who can't get over a one-night stand. But once again the two pals converse a little too brightly about nothing in particular - clothes, art, the mountain, the neighbourhood, the mystery person who discounted the price on Su-young's apartment. We never quite find out why.

Gam-hee runs into a third pal, and apologises for some long-previous slight. We never find out what. This third pal just happens to be married to Gam-hee's ex, a famous, and famously windy, writer.

Can the writer be sincere, if he just keeps saying the same thing over and over? An obvious reference to HSS himself, with two dozen movies in two dozen years. Then Gam-hee herself works a brittle encounter with the ex himself.

Cerebral manoeuvres about art and artists, but this is a movie, which has to signify through visuals, not just dialogue. Inside 80 minutes, HSS largely pulls it off. He is one of a kind, and I wish his movies were easier to access.

If you find "Parasite" over the top, try HSS instead, for a different aspect of Korea's wonderful cinema.

A film in three sections, the first of which was easily 10 stars for me. Not really like anything I've ever seen, though the long takes, simple framing and meandering but always engaging dialogue is reminiscent of Rohmer. Also as in Rohmer, the abundant chatting gives the characters plenty of space to reveal the peculiarities and even little aggressions behind their seemingly bland, friendly normality. What's really new is how effortlessly, almost inexplicably funny all this is. I was just delighted by this part, by its originality, sheer, rare intelligence and perfect subtlety. Virtually nothing else in cinema now reaches these kinds of heights and, watching on Mubi as I was, where one is all too aware of this, I was feeling immensely relieved: 'Finally, something good.'

Then the second section starts, our 30s female protagonist visits another friend and a sinking feeling set in as I realised the comedy was gone and wasn't coming back. Was I just in it for the yuks? No, damnit, the funny part was also the smart part that had something to say, and the writing of which was like a delicate high wire act. After that, the film kneecaps itself with its own self-conscious, humourless pursuit of profundity, and where part 1 was subtle, the lunging at the depths is almost embarrassingly blunt.

It's like the film is dumping on the first section, on its own best part, telling us it was all just a bit of fun before we got to the serious, important, grown-up stuff. But look how banal that stuff is. Did we really need to meet the second friend to learn, yet again, that the single life is hard, or the third to learn, again yet again, that marriage is often no better? Did we, in particular, need the protagonist's repetition in each of these sections of the same info about her life with her husband? Yes, it arguably takes on new inflections each time, but the first was already weird and easily the most interesting, precisely because it was delivered as if it was perfectly fine.

It's all reminiscent of the lesson anyone learns if they take a decent improv class: those things you think you need to do to justify the piece are done out of insecurity and are bad.

Summary

A film that, with astonishing naturalness, based on the successive reunions of a woman with three friends, reflects how many times we must reconstruct the other based only on what he tells us about himself, how many times we are just what we formulate and we reveal about ourselves through our discourse, how many times we are our story.

Review:

Taking advantage of a business trip from her husband, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) goes out to visit some friends whom she has not seen for a long time.

Apparently it sounds small: basically Hong San-soo's film (Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival) is made up of Gam-hee's three conversations with her friends. The question is everything that is at stake there and in what way.

In the first place, the incredible feeling of naturalness and even lightness that these reunions convey, filmed in long still shots nuanced with some zooms and other resources. Who are those women? What is its history? What do they propose? What is the link between them? We will learn about some things, but never as a grandiose or transcendent revelation and always under the sign of cordiality and a generally relaxed atmosphere. Other issues will remain in an interesting and suggestive out of the field such as stories taken up in media res. But this narrative distension will only be interrupted by the brief appearances of men on the scene as disruptive elements: they will be the ones who bring the uncomfortable moments, contrasting with the consensus of cordiality of the women. One of these interventions will acquire truly anthological humorous overtones.

It is also necessary to point out the relevance that the scenarios take, thanks to the framing and the dialogues. The feeling of immediacy, of being there, in those houses, is really palpable.

The woman who escapes is a film that with astonishing naturalness (hand in hand with the remarkable performances) reflects how many times we must reconstruct the other based only on what he tells us about himself, how many times we are just what we formulate and reveal of us through our discourse, in a story that from time to time even leads us to question everything we hear.

TWWR is about an extremely thin woman who visits three friends, separately, while her husband (who may not exist) is away on a trip. With each friend she eats and drinks and talks. This is a fairly common device for when there's no other action to be getting on with: meals, a substitute for drama which you will see in any soap opera you care to name.

Pleasant enough to look at, well acted on the whole and interesting for a glimpse of middle-class Korean life, which seems to be exactly like any other middle class life. Some of the crash zooms are a bit clumsy, maybe the camera was old. Rather slow - people park their cars, try on coats, watch films, eat, drink and talk. Only two men appear, which may be a positive for you. Middle class Korea looks, er, nice. Seoul house prices are discussed at length.

The dramatic tension appears to rest in the fact that no matter how much she eats, she gets thinner and thinner. She doesn't do any running. Does she have worms? The question is left unresolved.