Doesn’t matter how you dress them up, men will always remain fools and dogs at heart.

At least that’s the depiction of males in “Woman is the Future of Man,” in which writer/director Hong Sangsoo presents us with a slice-of-life portrait of two men who reunite with a woman they once, and still, loved. The deceptively feminist title is taken from a passage in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, about the days of men ending and how the new hope of mankind is in his better half. But Rilke was no feminist and neither is Hong. This is a story about men and their clumsiness with women, their willful competition with each other, and their dogged desires for the opposite sex.

Yoo Jitae plays Munho, a filmmaker who has returned from the States, who visits his old friend Hanjoon (Kim Taewoo), a married art professor with a family. They commiserate over drinks, but it’s not a happy reunion. Tensions still brew between the men, leading to outbursts of jealousy, including an argument over a “Yankee” style hug with Munho’s wife.

The reunion is further complicated when Sunhwa, Munho’s old flame, enters the picture. The three hang out together and old feelings return. When Munho finds out Sunhwa, whom he practically abandoned to go to America, had a relationship with Hanjoon, he literally runs away from her, feeling betrayed, though he’s far from innocent himself. Meanwhile, Hanjoon tells Sunhwa little lies to needle his way back into her affections, though his heart is actually ambivalent. While Munho and Sunhwa’s characters are intriguing, the crass Hanjoon is the most developed of the three. Tied down by mortgage and marriage, he is obsessed with sex and unable to address his unhappiness.

With such male leads, any lesser film would have fallen back on the girl as the locus of wisdom, but in “Woman is the Future of Man,” Hong does well to skirt past that. Yes, Sunhwa, played by Sung Hyunah, is the most honorable character in the film; she is mature with a clear sense of her own feelings. But Sunhwa is also a catalyst and a mystery. She is honest, beautiful and loves both men. Beyond that, we don’t know who she is, nor do we need to know; it’s the men who are the problem. Embroiled in arguments, shamelessly flirting with women — Munho and Hanjoon are both pathetic and humorous at the same time.

I should also mention a familiar double standard in films, where full-body nudity is relegated to women but not to men. Hong walks a fine line with this, but saves himself in service to the story. Because Sunhwa is the only emotionally honest character, she is literally bared naked in the film.

And as a film made in the neo-realist vein, you can forget about clean endings that wrap everything up neatly or the build up of suspense before the big reveal. From beginning to end, the film is a well-crafted, steadily paced character study that doesn’t preach or attempt any answers; it just shows you people and what they do to each other.