The Woman Who Ran

"Hong Sang-soo (of 'Alone at Night on the Beach') is the filmmaker of the everyday. He directs his camera to seemingly banal conversations in compact settings, few actors, no effects and even a certain exaggeration in the use of zooms. And that's exactly what we see in 'Domangchin yeoja'. The feature film follows three acts of the same woman, played by the long-time muse of the filmmaker, Kim Min-hee. In the first act, she visits a friend who has separated and now lives with another woman. It is a place far away from everything and everyone, with mountains appearing in the window view. In this conversation, as usual in the Korean cinema, we understand a little more about who our protagonist is: she is married, has been living with her husband for five years, from whom she has never been away. Then she visits another lonely friend in an apartment and finally has a casual meeting with an acquaintance at the cinema. This meeting says a lot about Min-hee and Sang-soo who, in addition to being muse and director, also faced a scandal in real life as lovers. From this mix of meetings, we have a dense film, despite its apparent sensitivity, in which the protagonist gives us signs of what she lives or has already lived. Much is between the lines, in the unsaid. That is why it is a film that requires sensitivity on the part of the audience, who in turn must understand and accept the slowness and the rhythm of the story."