A train circles the frozen world at high speed, the remnants of humanity inside.
A father hunts the mutated monster that kidnapped his daughter.
A girl befriends a super-pig and goes on a worldwide adventure with it.
These are the worlds of Bong Joon-ho, and underneath their at times pulpy genre exteriors
lies a morass of complex characters.
Beginning his career with a number of box office hits in South Korea, Bong built on
his success with two English-language features, Snowpiercer and Okja.
Now he’s returned to his roots with Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and
is the first Korean film to be nominated for an Oscar.
Let’s take a look at what makes Bong Joon-ho such a compelling filmmaker.
Over the course of his career, Bong has jumped from thriller to horror to sci-fi; clearly
he’s comfortable dealing with genre elements.
But what’s surprising about his work is how frequently those elements are cleverly
subverted.
A great example of this is The Host, which follows layabout dad Gang-du and the rest
of the Park family searching for their youngest, Hyun-seo, who has been kidnapped by a mutated
river creature.
In an early scene, an ordinary day at the family’s riverside food kiosk is interrupted
by the arrival of the monster.
The usual convention here might be to hold off revealing the monster for maximum impact
later, but Bong opts instead to show the monster in its entirety, in broad daylight.
And, as if to show off just how little Bong cares for these conventions, the normal choice
for protagonist- an American soldier- tries to distract the monster and loses an arm for
his troubles.
Ouch.
Now the audience’s preconceptions have been disturbed in a way that invites them to engage
with the emerging themes of the film, so instead of the mystery of the monster we’re encouraged
to focus on the Park family, the ineptitude of the authorities, and the encroachment of
US influence in the crisis.
By subverting genre in this way, Bong is able to explore far-reaching political themes,
often around class conflict and social justice.
Having grown up in the shadow of the South Korean military dictatorship, these themes
are ever-present in his work.
You can see this clearly in Snowpiercer, concerning a train of the same name that’s taking an
endless trip around a frozen world with the last of humanity surviving inside.
The front of the train lives in relative luxury, albeit in narrow confines; the back of the
train is crammed full of people who boarded at the last minute, living in cargo spaces
with negligible facilities and little food.
Curtis- Chris Evans- leads a rebellion, determined to make it to the front of the train.
The clear parallels with the class system is spelled out in a speech by Tilda Swinton’s
character, Minister Mason: "I am a hat, you are a shoe.
I belong on the head, you belong on the foot.
I belong to the front, you belong to the tail.
Know your place.
Keep your place."
So far, so straightforward a critique of capitalism.
But Bong’s depiction of life inside the train is more nuanced than it first appears;
the front carriages, for all their wealth, are kept sedate by wide use of an industrial
by-product that can induce hallucinations, and Curtis’s revolution is just the most
recent in a line of failed attempts to change the status quo.
Most tellingly, a few characters question whether it matters if you’re in the front
or the back; no-one is really free inside the train.
Rumble rumble rattle rattle, who is the reason why?
With its at-times absurd caricatures of capitalist alienation, Snowpiercer wears its political
leanings openly.
But underneath these broad themes are biting questions about humanity and our capacity
for cruelty and ignorance, which is often served with a healthy dose of dark humour.
These elements are explored in Bong’s break-out hit Memories of Murder, loosely based on a
real series of killings that took place in Hwaseong from the mid 80s to early 90s.
Rural detective Park is overwhelmed by the complexity of evidence-gathering and investigation;
he prefers to rely on his supposed shamanistic powers, an ability to sense innocence or guilt
by looking someone in the eyes.
A by-the-book detective from Seoul, Seo, arrives to aid the investigation and the two butt
heads over their different methods.
The case is repeatedly delayed when evidence is mishandled, mirroring real-life issues
in the case which at the time of the film’s production was still unsolved.
In this early sequence, Park arrives at a crime scene where a woman’s body has been
discovered.
It’s complete chaos; kids are running about, playing near the body; locals crowd around
while the police and forensics team take pratfalls in a nearby ditch.
Park finds a footprint, and then watches it get run over by a tractor.
All this information about how badly the investigation is run is communicated in a single shot, excellently
blocked and paced; clever stuff.
This scene paints a broader picture of Bong’s worldview, as the disinterested police ignore
a murder victim’s body and inadvertently bar the investigation of the case; along with
the elements of physical comedy, this becomes an insight into how dark and absurd human
nature can be.
These signature traits come together in Parasite, in which a poor family in Seoul infiltrates
the life- and house- of a well-to-do family.
The home life of the Kims is meticulously realised, illustrating their struggles to
get by with a search for the WiFi they ‘borrow’ from nearby cafes.
The contrast with the wealthy Park family could not be more stark, as symbolised by
their immaculate, ultramodern home.
But all is not what it seems, and something much darker lurks beneath the surface.
Carefully crafted, darkly funny and with a rich political subtext, Parasite is a thrilling
cinematic experience, and another achievement in the astonishing filmography of Bong Joon-ho.