South Korean culture is undergoing a bit of a moment in the West lately, with boy bands like BTS firing up armies of teenage fans. But cinema heads have known for some time that the country is home to some of the most innovative genre filmmakers in the world. The one who has achieved the most success in the West is Bong Joon-Ho, best known for 2013’s post-apocalyptic train drama Snowpiercer. His most recent, Parasite, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, making him the first Korean director to ever claim that prize.
The world of speculative fiction is richer and more diverse than ever before, but a survey of the career of Bong Joon-Ho backs up the assertion that he might be the single voice that is best poised to carry the torch of geek movies forward into the future. Come with us as we explore the life and themes of this unique, innovative creative force.
Secret Origins
Born in the conservative industrial city of Daegu, enjoying a post-war boom as South Korea established itself as a player in the electronics industry, Bong Joon-Ho was fascinated with film at an early age. After his family moved to Seoul, he consumed movies at a frantic pace, watching many Western films on the U.S. Army-run AFKN channel. He soon started observing the inner mechanics of the moviemaker’s art, counting cuts in Sam Peckinpah movies.
He chose not to study film in college, though, instead pursuing a degree in sociology. Even though his father was an artist, he felt that cinema wasn’t a career that a young man could express himself in. After working up the nerve to change his path, he was accepted into the prestigious two-year directing program at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, where he would create several shorts that screened on the festival circuit internationally.
2000 saw the release of his first film, Barking Dogs Never Bite. The dark comedy about an unemployed college professor who gets driven to madness by barking dogs, kicking off a bizarre comedy of errors involving a canine-eating janitor, a young girl who wants to be a hero and a marriage in crisis. It’s a solid film but very of a piece with what Korean cinema was doing at that time.
He followed it with Memories of Murder in 2003. Based on the story of Korea’s first serial murderer, it cleaned up at the annual Grand Bell Awards, winning Best Film as well as trophies for Bong and actor Song Kang-ho. The film also sees the director start to take cautious steps outside the realistic world – one of the investigating detectives believes he can judge a suspect’s guilt or innocence by making eye contact with them, and the movie closes with him locking the audience itself in his gaze.
But it was his third film, 2004’s The Host, that would bring him to the attention of the world and launch him into a new phase of his career.
Big Thinking
Science fiction draws its power from the ability to tease out the ramifications of technology we’re just learning how to live with. The best works in the genre are relatable at the same time that they’re unfamiliar, and that’s where The Host shines.
On the surface, it’s just a monster movie. Something big and ugly is in the Han River and it grabs a young girl, the daughter of a dim-witted snack bar owner named Park Gang-Du. After being quarantined due to exposure to a mysterious virus, the Park family breaks out and launches a quixotic rescue mission into the Seoul sewers to get her back. But it’s what’s bubbling down below that makes The Host so interesting.
The political situation in South Korea has been fraught for half a century, as you’d expect from a country that’s literally been split in two. Many Koreans harbor resentment for America’s involvement in the war, as well as the soldiers still stationed there, and that’s a huge theme in The Host. Monsters make incredible metaphors, and the sewer beast is a slithering incarnation of the United States’ disdain for the mess they left behind.
But America isn’t the only villain in the movie, and that’s why it shines. The Park family has to stand together against their own government, the media, and their fellow citizens. In a world where a social media panopticon records everything we do for future cancellation, that kind of paranoia seems more and more reasonable.
2009’s Mother returned the director to the theme of unsolved deaths and corrupt detectives from Memories of Murder. He had actually been developing the script at the same time he was making the previous film, and the two complement each other. The titular Mother is the single parent of a mentally disabled child who is arrested for the murder of a young girl. She goes to unbelievable lengths to clear her son’s name, only to discover that he is actually guilty of the crime.
Us And Them
Bong’s work is explicitly class-conscious, and that is one of the most vital forces behind his relevance. It’s not surprising that the source material of Snowpiercer appealed to him, illustrating a constricted world in which poor people are literally segregated along a single line of power towards the back of the train.
Based on a European comic series by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer saw Bong direct an English-language film for the first time. Featuring an international cast, the story follows the passengers of the titular train, doomed to forever circle the earth after a man-made ice age makes the planet uninhabitable. When the “scum” at the rear revolt and charge towards the engine to seize power, it kicks off a series of intense, imaginative set piece fights.
This microcosm of a society is absurdly exaggerated, of course, but in a world where 1% of the world’s population possesses 45% of the world’s money, it’s not that wild. The concept of lower-class revolution being used as a tool of political power by the ruling class is a potent one, and Bong really wrings the most out of it while still delivering a kick-ass action film with some incredible performances. It’s one of the most obvious illustrations of his formula.
For The Children
2017 saw Bong direct, co-write and produce Okja, which turns his eye towards the moral ramifications of genetic engineering and factory farming. When a company develops a “super pig” and dispatches samples across the globe, one grows into a huge behemoth under the loving care of a little girl. What’s compelling about Okja is the odd morality of the piece, with both the huge company and the Animal Liberation Front both looking to use the pig for their own uses. It’s a little more simplistic by the standards of Bong’s other films, but even addressing the untenable moral nature of eating meat in the modern world is heady stuff for crowd-pleasing films.
With Parasite, he moves away from overt science fiction to focus the lens on class again. It tells the story of two families – one rich, one poor – that become entangled with each other after the poor son begins tutoring the rich daughter. Soon enough, all four members of the poor family are employed by the rich one, but they soon discover a terrifying secret in the basement that not only kicks off a frenzy of tension and violence but also exposes the many different layers of wealth, privilege and power in the world.
Made in Korean with a significantly smaller budget than his last two movies, Parasite still manages to pack a significant punch. Its closest comparison is to films like Get Out and Us that wring horror from the ways humans interact with each other more than from anything supernatural. It’s an incredible movie that deserves all of the acclaim it’s getting.
What’s fascinating about Bong Joon-Ho’s work – and the future of it – is his relentlessly expansive imagination. While other filmmakers wind up trapped in their pet issues, revisiting similar themes to diminishing results, he’s always poking into new worlds and new ideas. That imagination is at the very core of geek culture, and it’s something that’s lacking in so many big-budget, high-gravitas sci-fi films.
Bong’s success both at Cannes and commercially positions him in a very interesting position. He’s got a profile high enough to get big budgets, but also is more than comfortable with intimate, close-hewn settings. It’s fair to say that where he leads, others are bound to follow. If you don’t have your eyes on him now, you might want to fix your face.
from Geek.com https://ift.tt/2IFcAlo
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment