Two old friends, an aspiring filmmaker Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo) and a successful married university professor Munho (Yoo Ji-tae), meet for a meal, drink too much and decide to look up old girlfriend Sunhwa (Sung Hyunah). As the pair booze, eat and lob-and-deflect insults, New Korean Cinema luminary Hong Sangsoo’s 2004 Woman is the Future of Man plays games with time and perception in numerous flashbacks to the woman they have shared between them. Their decision to visit Sunhwa at the hotel bar where she works is governed less by nostalgia than by something wanting, childish and bruised in their own lives.
Woman is like an Asian Old Joy without the elongated road trip or the mellow, bittersweet bead on male friendship. Hong’s painfully perceptive tragedy instead dwells on life’s aching dissatisfaction and the deep divides between people: More drinking, excruciating drunken masochism and sex follow. What began as a reunion shape shifts—carried along by Hong’s by-turns comic and wistful choice of music—into a glimpse at the men behind the masks seen through their
relationship with the lovely, emotionally-fragile Sunhwa. Woman is the measure of man in Hong’s film, and by that yardstick both Munho and Hunjoon come up short, prone to cavalier cruelty, Herculean selfishness and obliviousness. In one flashback, after bedding Sunhwa and then rushing to orgasm, Munho reveals, “I didn’t know that women shaved their legs.” Hong hints that the mysteries of the feminine toilet are the least of what Munho doesn’t know about women.
Alienation within even the intimacy of skin-to-skin sexual contact defines the quicksilver emotional explorations of this anti-buddy film. Romance and flirtation are substituted with beelines to hotel rooms and the preferred service-oriented blowjob as the menu item most requested. Even Sunhwa’s dog ambles out of the room in disgust.
In Woman, there’s a gulf between friends, between students and their teacher, between husbands and wives, between classes and generations but the one between men and women trumps all of them—a Grand Canyon chasm Hong allows us to ponder with vertigo-inducing queasiness.
