In The Woman Who Ran, even after a few years of marriage, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) has never been apart from her husband until he takes a business trip; she takes advantage of the opportunity to visit each of three old friends to catch up. In each of the three vignettes, Gam-Hee gets a tour of the friend’s house, sits for a meal and covers much the same ground in conversation. The audience settles in, and gleans a few nuggets about each of the women. It’s pretty low-key until the eruption of a final simmering confrontation.
Writer-director Hong Sang-soo cranks out little, intimate, clever films like Woody Allen did in his heyday and is kind of his own genre. As he demonstrates in Yourself and Yours, Claire’s Camera, Walk-up and The Woman Who Ran, Hong is a droll observer of human behavior. There’s usually a lot of drinking and eating in his films; there’s far less drinking than usual in The Woman Who Ran, but the gals do devour the food.
The acting is first-rate, especially Kim Min-hee, whom we also saw in Hong Sang-soo’s Claire’s Camera, You may remember her riveting performance in The Handmaiden.
I’m such a fan, I’ll watch any Hong-Sang-Soo movie. Even though The Woman Who Ran is only 77 minutes long, I won’t recommend it to a general audience because the payoff is not worth such slow burn. I do recommend that you sample Hong Sang-soo by watching his You, Yourself and Yours, which I tagged as “Buñuel meets Seinfeld”; you can find it as Yourself and Yours on AppleTV and YouTube.
The Woman Who Ran is available to stream from AppleTV and YouTube.