The Woman Who Ran: Post-Marital Research

I haven't seen a Hong Sang-soo film for awhile so it's a bit of a readjustment getting into his rhythm and flow. I know from past experiences, however, that sometimes what looks like a meandering improvisation adds up to something quite substantial. I knew to be patient! Yet what to make of the initial conversations in The Woman Who Ran re: the beauty of a cow's eyes, the bullying by a neighbor's rooster, or the ethics surrounding the feeding of stray cats? Before you've figured that out, Hong has shifted to a completely new scene: gone is the divorcee (Seo Young-hwa) who appears to be in a lesbian couple; in her place is a Pilates instructor (Song Seon-mi) navigating the challenges of dating in middle age. The topics shift from animals to money: a rent deposit, her million-dollar-savings, her successful business... See a connection yet? I didn't.

Which brings us to the final reunion at Cafe Emu where our protagonist (Kim Min-hee) has one more "girl talk," this time with an old friend (Kim Sae-byeok) who now runs a movie theater. This last encounter has the least amount of dialogue but it's also when the movie comes together. For each of these reunions finds our drifting diminishing her feelings from her unseen husband. The random meet-ups suddenly register as a testing of the waters for a possible future, always with an awareness that the men in these other women's lives are uniformly irritating: a demanding neighbor, a stalking poet (Ha Seong-guk), and a self-important author (Kwon Hae-hyo).

The Day After: Seeing Theater

How did Hong Sang-soo manage to make three films in a single year? It certainly wasn't by sloppily running from one to the next. For there's nothing messy or rushed about The Day After, the third of his 2017 trilogy of sorts that also includes Claire's Camera and On the Beach at Night Alone. But it probably helps that he brought in some of the same actors for each film which, because of their intimate nature, concentrates all the action among a very small cast. For The Day After, he also shoots in black and white (which simplifies the design elements) and shoots many of the two-person, largely interior scenes in extended, medium long shots with no cuts and only the occasional zoom, all of which heightens our sense of eavesdropping on a very personal conversation (or perhaps a master class in acting). Indeed Hong's choice to have so much of the action filmed in profile turns the face-to-camera shot into something remarkable since it's only when a character looks away from whomever she's talking to that we see her face directly. And what faces these are to look at.

As Song Areum, a young woman who is starting a fraught new job at a book publishing company, Kim Min-hee constantly delights us with her asides of impatience, distress, confusion. For when she turns away from the other character, she's in some ways shielding her face, meaning that these shots of Kim turning aside are shots of her face unshielded. It's the hidden exposed! As a despairing wife, actress Cho Yun-hee similarly is constantly flashing her hidden self to the camera as she struggles to get her husband to admit that he's been seeing another woman while he noisily slurps his soup. If Kim Sae-byeok shares less, it's because her role as the other woman demands that she generally be on her guard. The only time we truly see her psychologically naked is when she's drunk. Life's tough that way. At the center of it all is Kim "The Boss" Bongwan, the book publisher played by Kwon Hae-yo with an honesty that makes him both impossible to like or dislike. As for the movie as a whole, I liked it very much. I'm so appreciative of the Museum of the Moving Image for programming this trilogy.

Stateless Things: When a Moving Picture Is a Moving Picture

Stateless Things left me thinking about how the word "movies" is shorthand for "moving pictures" and how "moving pictures" can mean a few things:

1. a two-dimensional portrait seemingly brought to life
2. an extension of Muybridge's artful experiments in capturing action
3. a portrait that makes you feel something deeply
4. any combination of the items above

Unafraid of prolonged silences or the slightest of conversations, director Kim Kyung-mook allows many scenes in Stateless Things to act upon you like snapshots or drawings, sculptures or mobiles. Like art. You're invited to look, not to listen, as your primary way of intuiting relationships, identities, stories. Observe the way bodies inhabit their environments. Let go of plot. Let go of conventional character development. An early sequence, in which Joon (Paul Lee) and Soonhee (Kim Sae-byeok) rush around pumping fuel at the gas station during rush hour, is enough to hold you captivated. A dance routine, performed by a "kept boy" (Yeom Hyun-joon) while his "daddy" (Im Hyeong-gook) is at work, conjures hidden dreams and desires even if there's no one else in the room to interpret/appreciate the act.

This distrust of telling too much with words is a hallmark of a certain type of indie film, and Stateless Things fearlessly trots out other tropes of the genre, with poetic lines demarcating the film's three parts, non-sequential narratives, and a strange ending that refutes its two separate story lines as being truly separate at all. You may have questions in terms of what actually happened at the end but asking questions is what Kim's moving picture is all about.