The film baffles the mysteries of everyday life: NPR

60-year-old South Korean writer and director Hong Sang-soo is one of the most tirelessly productive directors working today. He’s made over twenty films over the past two decades, sometimes making one or even two a year. The consistency and quality of his work has earned him a large following at film festivals and among Art House audiences, who have come to love his sad and sad films: skinny, low-budget dramas that often focus on the divergent dynamics between women and people. men.

His stories are usually built around a few recurring elements: romantic entanglements, personal anxieties, and casual conversations that gradually turn uncomfortable and revealing — especially if there’s a drinking turn. For this reason, Hong has often been wrongly accused of making the same movie over and over, with only slight differences in story and structure. It’s not that Hong is repeating himself. It is more than that that he is fascinated by repetition as a fact of life, in the way people often find comfort and dissatisfaction with routine.

He explores this tendency to sublime influence in The woman who ranHis latest movie is on theaters. If you’re not familiar with Hong’s business, this is as good a place to start as any. The title is a bit of a mystery – there are several women in the story, and we don’t see any of them running around. The main character is a moderately-behaved woman from Seoul named Gamhee, played by brilliant actress Kim Min-hee, Hong’s frequent collaborator and off-screen partner.

In the movie, Gamhee makes three different visits to three different women she hasn’t seen in a long time. In the first story, she went to stay with an old friend who recently broke up and now lives with a roommate outside of Seoul. In the second, Gamhee gets to know another old friend who works as a Pilates instructor and has romantic problems: she likes one neighbor and gets annoyed with the other.

The third story takes place in a cafe in Seoul, and is more tense than the other two, as Ghami meets a woman she has had a falling out with for years. Hong does not push this scene toward a heated confrontation. Instead, he leaves his characters on tiptoe on their way through an emotional minefield, clinging to a veneer of literature that makes the whole situation more difficult.

Hong is a wonderful watcher. Rather than slipping between his actors, he leaves their conversation going in one take, with little camera movement except for the occasional zoom. He gets remarkably natural performances, with all the hesitations and quirks of normal speech. You feel as if you are there in the same room as these characters.

every chapter of The woman who ran It’s funny, poignant, and absorbent on its own, but the movie is much more interesting to think about afterwards as you wonder how these seasons fit together. In each story, Gamhee and her friend share a meal – and one of our rare pleasures in Hong films is that they show us people who actually take the time to eat and enjoy their food. Also in each story, an uninvited man appears in the middle of the road and leads to a rather disturbing interaction. At one point, the divorced friend and her roommate get into a polite argument with their male neighbor who wants them to stop feeding the stray cats that sometimes enter their yard. It’s my favorite scene in the movie, a little masterpiece of passive-aggressive controversy, and culminated in the best cat reaction shot I’ve seen in ages.

Hong usually divides his attention equally between women and men, and has often been a sharp critic of and implicated in the misconduct of Korean males. Here, the focus is on women. Gamhee of course gets the most screen time, but she’s also reluctant to reveal much about herself. We know she has a pair that she claims is inseparable – a statement that rings a little more than a blank every time she repeats it. If they are inseparable, why not meet him?

Perhaps Gamhee is the woman who runs after all, escaping a life of emptiness who can’t bring herself to be recognized and checking on women from her past to see if she’s better off. Kim’s sweet performance hints at that possibility without fully committing to it, and it’s this mystery that gives this deceptively small film its long-lasting resonance. As Hong Sang-soo reminds us, there are few things that are inherently dramatic, or mysterious, like the things of everyday life.