Film Review: Quirky, Socially-Conscious Korean Films

The Host (2006)
Parasite (2019)
Directed by Bong Joon-ho

Secret Sunshine (2017)
Burning (2018)
Directed by Lee Chang-dong

The recent Best Picture Oscar for Parasite piqued my interest in Korean cinema, something that I was completely ignorant of. It turns out that’s it’s a rich, diverse industry, populated with the typical mix of adventure, romance, sci-fi, et.al. But there are a couple of directors that seem to stand out, and have achieved an international presence at film festivals, and now, even at the Oscars.

Bong Joon-ho (b. 1969), who made a quirky and charming appearance at the Oscars to receive his surprise Best Picture award, has been making films since 2000. He favors films about average people who do uncommon things, such as a professor who abducts a neighbor’s barking dog (Barking Dogs Never Bite, 2000), serial killers (Memories of Murder, 2003), and average-guy sociopaths (Influenza, 2004). The first of his films that I have seen is The Host (2006). This is a creepy take on Japanese sci-fi films like Godzilla, in which modern science or industrial crime leads to environmental calamity. The film opens with a creepy American scientist (working at a US military base in South Korea) forcing his Korean employee to dump a toxic chemical into the water supply. The result is a mutant-monster-reptile that terrorizes the city. What is striking about the film is the mix of horror (children eaten by the beast) and quirky humor (a character tries to fight off the beast with a “Do not Walk on the Grass” sign. Children are trapped in dark dungeons, families decimated, and the government impotent in the face of disaster (sound familiar?). The creature looks a bit low-tech and plastic, evoking those 1950s Japanese films, I think intentionally. A theme that will recur in Mr. Bong’s work is how the average middle-class folks need to resourcefully solve the problems that the government or scientific elites cannot. The monster is eventually defeated by a child, a fed-up middle-aged woman, and a humorless young woman elite archer who launches a propitious flaming arrow (South Koreans excel at Olympic archery, and revere their medal-winners). This is not a profound film, but it is atmospherically shot, moodily lit and scored, and has a very distinct dark-comedic feel.

Mr. Bong’s huge hit Parasite (2019) follows up on many of these themes. It follows a superficially unproductive (pizza box folder), lazy-appearing lower middle class family and how they craftily and sociopathically take over a wealthy home, imprisoning the rich folks by first deferentially offering them their services (a tutor, a music teacher), but then taking over entirely. There is a rich mix of middle-class heroism, farce, chase scenes, deadpan humor, and dramatic tension, similar to The Host, but more subtle and artful. We see homeless shelters contrasted with wealthy people at an extravagant outdoor party, which eventually ends in Hamlet-like mayhem and bloody carnage. There is a definite Shakespearean feel to this film, mixing the comedies and the tragedies, in particular how Mr. Bong relentlessly moves his plot to its bloody climax. Given our recent societal focus on income disparity and its consequences, it was perhaps the perfect film to win this year’s Oscar. By the way, is the pairing of host and parasite a titular connection between the films?

Lee Chang-dong (b. 1954) has been making films since 1997 and has won multiple international awards for his work. His films are more introverted than Mr. Bong’s, telling the stories of oppressed individuals trying to survive in the increasingly isolating, consumerist South Korean culture. He favors tales of class conflict and somber topics like mental illness (Poetry, 2010) and grieving, in the excellent Secret Sunshine (2007). This film begins as we see an apparently inept woman trying to drive to the rural city where her husband was born. Over the course of the film, we ever-so-gradually learn about this woman, as she gains independence, competence, and the ability to survive in a conservative, meddling, gossipy small city. She is suspected because of her elite pretensions (she is a frustrated concert pianist, now piano teacher) and the fact that she comes from the “big city” Seoul. Why is she now alone? What happened to the husband that she apparently reveres, but is not now present? The director unfolds his plot both leisurely and relentlessly. The brilliance of the film is that we gradually get to know the main character and see her depth and complexity as we gradually learn the mysterious backstory. The film takes a violent midway downward turn, as the woman’s beloved child is abducted and killed, yet the film ends in guarded optimism, eschewing melodrama and showing how grief resolves, in as natural a depiction as I can remember. Mr. Lee shows himself to be a keen and sympathetic viewer of human nature and how we handle adversity, a more reserved Ingmar Bergman, if you will.

My favorite Korean film to date is Mr. Lee’s Burning (2018), an international breakthrough, and a prize-winner at Cannes. The film is marvelous. The title refers to Faulkner’s short story Barn Burning about a man accused of burning his own property for insurance. This is sort of a flipped metaphoric subplot here, as a dissolute young urban rich guy ventures into rural Korea and randomly burns down greenhouses, for no particular reason. His girlfriend is Shin Hae-mi, a flighty, dissolute commercial girl who was born in the country, but now likes expensive city toys. The third person in the love triangle is Lee Jong-su (the outstanding actor Yoo Ah-in, above), a tortured aspiring author who obsesses over Hae-mi. He is torn between his rural, lowkey village and the excitement of the city, and between maintaining his core values vs. jettisoning them to appeal to Hae-mi. The three characters remain enigmatic, yet compelling throughout, and the tension between them, and between urban and rural South Korea, drives Burning. Many of the scenes occur near the border with North Korea, and we hear distant propaganda broadcasts and martial music fading in and out of the scenes. There is a constant, uneasy tension to the film, and the violent ending (Shakespeare again) is surprising and apt. Along with Mr. Bong’s films, you get the sense that South Koreans are living on top of a bomb, simultaneously adjusting to societal pressures, income disparities, and the price of rapid modernization. True, the Japanese have faced similar growth issues, but these Korean directors have produced a very un-Japanese response that is more extroverted, more angry, and less repressed. I will look for more of these films by these talented directors.