La femme qui s'est enfuie

Absurd dialogues, movie is shot like a school project, I feel like I wasted my time which will never get back.

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.

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.

" Three states, whether divorced, unmarried or married, none is perfect for a woman, each has its own pitfalls and perks, that amounts to common knowledge. As for Gam-hee, what runs underneath her 'happy marriage' guise is some undertow inaccessible to viewers. Kim Min-hee can telegraph emotional shadings in a heartbeat, but cumulatively, she hardly step out of her comfort zone in Hong's conceptualization of an 'every woman' to his liking, all her characters are consistently cerebral, coy, sensitive and prone to keep one's own counsel."

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore, thanks.

This is a comfort movie. The older you get, the more sensible you become. It is funny looking back into the past when we meet the familiar faces. Friendships, aquaintances, love, marriage, divorce, separation, loneliness, happiness, sadness, betrayals, and all other things together patched up. Sometimes we do need the closure even if it doesnt bothers so much. Remember everything that we worry about now wont even be an issue few years down the line.