Stills from "The Woman Who Ran Away"
The Woman Who Ran Away is South Korean director Hong Chang-so's 24th feature film and his seventh collaboration with Berlin actress Kim Min-hee. The film made his directorial career a fourth time in the Berlin Film Festival and was selected as a major competition film at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, and he himself won the Silver Bear for Best Director. In addition to the Berlin Film Festival, the film also won a screenplay award at the Bucharest International Film Festival in Romania and was invited to participate in the New York Film Festival and the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain.
This film has many characteristics of Hong Changxiu, such as Xu Yongwei, Jin Xibi, who regularly loves to use the team such as "Blade of Grass", Song Shanmei and Quan Haixiao in "Riverside Hotel", and his lover Jin Minxi is still the main bright character throughout the film. The film retains his usual simple, smooth and straightforward style, but it changes the narrative method of the previous male perspective, rarely presented from the female perspective, telling the story through zoom and long cameras zoom-in, zoom-out.
"The Woman Who Ran Away" is played by Kim Min-hee, a self-proclaimed happy married woman who leaves home to visit female friends who have not been together for a long time during her husband's business trip. She had a small gathering with her divorced elderly friends who lived in the suburbs, drinking magly while grilling meat; visiting Coach Pilates, who lived alone alone, to discuss her current little love affair and the small troubles caused by a one-night stand in the past; when she went to the movies alone, she met her former lover who worked in an independent cinema, and the two met awkwardly and tried to reconcile.
In these self-indulgent or dissident female friendships, a series of reunions and encounters narrate the state of mind of Korean women in different positions, and more importantly, the relationship between them and men. But what is special is that most of these male characters only have the back or side faces, and they can't see the faces of these men, as if they are just supporting characters, deliberately making these men disappear into women's lives, which is quite rare in Hong Changxiu's past works.
Perhaps because these actors are all fixed teams, acquainted with each other, through their natural unpretentious acting skills, it seems that they are really sisters who have known each other for a long time, getting together to tell their lives.
Do these differences mean that Hong Changxiu has created a new film from a female perspective? Do these modern women, who have escaped from men and intimacy, mean to be independent from now on?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > unspeakable repression</h1>
Interestingly, none of these women have children (or they do, they just don't say it), but the film focuses on the women's "afternoon tea small talk" style of small conversation, but depicts the traditional problems of gender and "motherhood".
Except for the awkward silence after the last meeting of the former love enemies, these conversations are natural and everyday, and the content is warm, but I always feel a sense of depression. On the one hand, the dialogue between these women is too gentle and too feminine; on the other hand, what I feel is that in the social structure, women have internalized the existing gender role norms.
The first two in the plot are women who are older than the heroine, so most of their dialogue with the heroine is to observe whether they are taking care of their sister and whether they have enough to eat. Did my sister sleep well? Will the quilt not be warm enough and get cold? Even former enemies of the same generation will cut apples for friends to eat when they meet.
This maternal brilliance and sisterhood made me feel stressed when I lived in Korea. In the Korean circle, the relationship between women is very close, after acquaintance, they will naturally call each other sisters, the way of speaking will change, they will affectionately hook up to walk together to eat and drink coffee, and they will also invite them to meet each other naked to go to the three warmths.
If you can understand Korean, you should hear more suppressed sounds. The women in the film are too gentle and elegant to speak, and they are not very similar to the image of "Aju Mama" in Korea in our impression, not the dog blood Korean drama or the familiar Korean movies that scream on the street and start pulling each other's hair.
However, many Korean women in real life have the courage to express their feelings; of course, there are times of repression, but the women in this film are too gentle and elegant, even when arguing with the male neighbor next door whether to continue to feed stray cats or try to scold the entangled men, the speech is still so gentle, and the voice is so low and depressed.
The heroine played by Jin Minxi, although she takes the initiative to visit the actors of these female friends, she is always listening to others tell about the decisions they have made and the lives they have lived, and rarely talks about their own things and ideas. Only when asked about my current life will I answer lightly: "Maybe I am happy now", "Maybe this is love".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > male violence</h1>
In this film, each woman has a corresponding man, but most of them only have the back or side of the face, and they can't see their faces.
Each of these men symbolizes different forms of violence and aggression. The heroine and her husband have been married for five years, but they have not been separated for half a day, because the husband feels that the people who love each other should stay together all the time. When visiting an older female friend, it happened that the man from the next door neighbor came to ring the bell, hoping that they would not feed the stray cat again, because his wife was too afraid to go out (we don't know what the real reason for not going out was unknown); in another family in the neighborhood, the woman ran away from home, leaving a daughter with her father, who was difficult to get along with.
As the three women chatted, they talked about the chickens raised by nearby neighbors: the rooster was terrible, and often pecked at the back of the hen's neck to show his authority, and pecked the back of the hen's neck bare. The film presents a male perspective, from the rooster that looks up at the hen, the man who looks down on the woman who forces them not to feed the stray cat, and the tiny stray cat in the middle. There are also young male poets who constantly harass and show affection, architects who have not yet divorced their wives and started an ambiguous relationship, and middle-aged male writers who are always annoying to their self-centered and chattering.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > Apples and Vegetables: Metaphors for Food and Gender</h1>
Another important gender perspective lies in the metaphor of food.
Every occasion when women meet, they always have to eat together. When she went to the suburbs to visit her first female friend, the heroine bought good quality meat and traditional Korean margary wine. When visiting the second female friend, the friend made pasta for the heroine, and the two ate noodles with white wine. In the café (which is also an art and literary venue for independent films and book publications), I met a former friend and love enemy who stole my former lover and got married, and even though we were extremely embarrassed when we met, we sat together and drank tea and specially cut apples to eat.
Diet as a metaphor is closely linked to gender. Personally cooking and feeding others is a role that women often give to society and traditional culture, and as for themselves, they are often the ones who do not eat - as shown in the movie - and even feed and care for stray cats as if they were their own children.
Of the three encounters, two emphasize the hand that cuts the apple. Skillfully peeling and peeling apples with a knife is often seen as the basis for whether a girl is "qualified". In the first encounter, the seemingly neutral roommate is very good at cutting apples, and in the third encounter, the former love enemy clumsily cuts the apple and apologizes, saying that he is really not good at these things.
A stronger metaphor than cooking or cutting an apple is the relationship between meat and vegetables. In the first encounter, the older divorced friend is a neutral female roommate, who is in charge of grilling meat and grilling it well, and she is also very good at cutting apples. However, the point is that the divorced elderly woman later tends to eat vegetables, and the heroine becomes more and more fond of meat in the marriage relationship; the single female Pilates coach accidentally burns the meat in the process of preparing food. Later, the former love enemy he encountered was just cutting the apple.
In addition to the close relationship between women and food preparation, the study theme of diet and gender also contains symbols of gender antagonism between meat and vegetables. Meat eating symbolizes strength, but also violence and bloody aggression; eating meat is clearly associated with conservative tradition of masculinity. Eating meat and drinking heavily is not only the image of the good guys, but also the restaurant selling point of the traditional American Western cowboy shape and the large steak.
Japan in the year of Emperor Tenmu (675) issued the "Meat Prohibition Order", began to eat part of the meat rule, after the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese and Westerners met, the most surprising thing is the strong physique and strong military ability of the Westerners, the Japanese began to think, is it necessary to learn the western countries eat life, often eat meat? In the 5th year of Meiji (1872), the people suddenly saw reports that The Meiji Emperor ate meat, and the government trumpeted meat to the people, one of the reasons was to enrich the country and strengthen the army. In the Korean era, influenced by Confucian culture, the scholar-doctor class (two classes) who emphasized reading and writing, although they played chess, poetry and painting every day, actually loved to eat beef.
Vegetarians or vegans, though there are different types, are also pursuing a belief system or ideology that rejects not only animal proteins, but also animals as part of an industrial supply chain. Carol. J． Carol J Adams' 1990 edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat links feminism to vegetarianism (Vegetarian-Feminist). She argues that veganism is the only logical solution to a social system that degrades women and animals to the "meat" that others want but disposes of at will.
The book is divided into three main parts: "The Patriarchal Texts of Meat," "From the Belly of Zeus," "Eat Rice, Have Faith in Women," and the epilogue, "Destabil Patriarchizingal." Consumption), which explores the phenomenon of cultural misogyny and the relationship between meat consumption and masculinity. There are many other relevant theoretical studies, but they also talk about the gender politics metaphors of meat for men and vegetarian food for women.
In addition, the drinks that women drink when they meet may also have some symbolic significance. When the elderly divorced friends grill meat, there is no shochu that men often drink, but instead of margary wine and wine; when the single friends eat pasta, it is accompanied by white wine. Coffee and tea are also common drinks, the heroine said in the second paragraph of the encounter that she did not drink coffee much, because she always felt uncomfortable after drinking, and as a result, in the third paragraph, she met her former love enemy who made her "uncomfortable" in the café.
After mixing with diet and discussions about their respective lives, intimate relationships, and marriages, the heroine, who became a meat lover after marriage, said lightly, "I think it seems okay not to eat meat from now on." These conversations seem to echo the gender politics and metaphors of meat eating, and women have moved to the other end of the patriarchy in food choices. There are many such texts and metaphors, and the Korean novelist Han Jiang's work "Vegetarian" actually talks about similar issues.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > the opposition between "nature" and "culture."</h1>
If diet is used as a metaphor as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the women in this film seem to have gradually or have been freed from male oppression to become autonomous. Is this really the case?
Another perspective from the director is the metaphor of mountains, seas, and nature. The first elderly woman moves to the suburbs after divorce and returns to the countryside away from the city, with someone raising chickens and someone growing vegetables near her home; the single woman in the second paragraph is always at home gazing at The Renwang Mountain not far away; at the end of the movie, the heroine is alone in the movie theater watching the sea on the screen.
Pastoral, nature, mountains, and seas all symbolize women's escape from men. Interestingly, the men they want to escape from have highly "cultural" backgrounds: the heroine's husband works as a translator at home on weekdays, sometimes teaching part-time at university; the older woman's ex-husband is the director, the poet and architect who haunt the single woman, and the man who shares the heroine's former love rival is a best-selling author.
However, this binary division of "nature" and "culture" is also often about the binary opposition between women and men. In the 1960s and 1970s, when feminists began to develop theories and debate various debates, the famous anthropologist Sherry Ortner wrote a very classic article1 discussing that in mainstream culture, men are often regarded as the end of culture, and women are classified as the natural side.
Men are educated and master the development of so-called "civilization"; women are virtuous without talent, and their greatest contribution is to marry and teach their children at home to reproduce. When women began to have equal access to education, the current mainstream ideology regarded the disciplines of science and engineering and nature (STEM) as a real "science", and true science was the basis for mastering the development of contemporary "civilization", and women were not suitable for entering these fields, and should continue to stay in the fields of literature, art, and home economics.
From such a director's point of view, if women want to escape from "culture" and enter "nature", is it back to the long-term limitations of women's imagination?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" Data-track="11" > Summary: Is it possible to escape and get free? </h1>
The film discusses escaping. A while ago, there was a very popular Japanese TV series called "Escape Is Shameful but Useful", but is it really shameful to escape?
When life is threatened, "Fight," "Freeze," or "Flight" are the instinctive reactions of most creatures to crisis and stress. This instinctive response to survival, after a long evolution, is preserved in our genes.
Faced with life's difficulties, we can choose to face each other head-on (like Naoki Hanzawa), freeze still (like me who chooses to keep a promise many times), or simply turn around beautifully and leave (like "The Woman Who Ran Away").
I think most people choose to freeze and stay still, but often they can't solve the problem at hand; how easy is it to choose a head-on duel, to face the entangled structure? More often, the existing structure is there, and people are powerless to change it although they have the heart; running away (or using a more neutral word: choosing to leave) is also a choice, but after leaving, can you really get freedom? Looking at the examples of these women, it seems that there are and there are none. But at the very least, having the courage to choose change is a good thing.
As for how the future will develop, what kind of path will be taken in your life, just like this movie does not provide the answer, who knows? Let's go on silently and quietly.
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