Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I haven’t seen either of these, but I know many people who felt that they were both better than OLD BOY, the best Korean film I saw last year. Let’s see what Elaine’s got to say about them...
I can’t believe it. This is my fifth report from this year’s festival, and I still haven’t got round to reviewing my second-favourite and third-favourite movie of the festival, nor the one that got the most tongues wagging.
Oh, well. I’ll get round to it eventually. Tomorrow, hopefully. Or the day after.
In the meantime, here are reviews of two great Korean films, “Memories of Murder” (the brilliant police-drama-cum-black-comedy that topped the Korean box office in 2003) and “Save the Green Planet!”, a bizarre sci-fi comedy which did badly in its country of origin but looks set to become a hit abroad. Chances are the real Korean film fans amongst you have already seen the films, as they’ve both been out on DVD for a while. Still, I’m going to devote some time to them, both because they were huge hits at the RIFF and because they’re so good that more people should check them out. Of course, they’re not as good as Kim Ki-duk’s “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring Again” (my favourite film of the festival, which I reviewed last week), but something tells me they’ll go down better with the AICN crowd. Especially “Save the Green Planet!”, which has the potential to rival “Ong-bak: Muay Thai Warrior” for this year’s AICN Asian Cult Hit of the Year Award despite the fact that it features neither martial arts nor mass-murdering teenagers. Yep, it is that good. And weird.
Anyhow, on with the show...
SAVE THE GREEN PLANET!
(Written and directed by Jang Jun-hwan)
How does one do justice to a film that isn’t one film, but God knows how many films rolled into one? For that is what “Save the Green Planet!” is. Ostensibly a sci-fi comedy (and a pretty wild one, too), it also features elements of a superhero movie, horror flick, detective story, tragedy, family drama, romance, melodrama, alienation flick and social commentary, stirred together in a way which even by Korean genre-mixing standards is impressive. The result is a deliciously schizophrenic film which was a huge hit in Rotterdam and should go on to win hearts elsewhere.
Best described as an anarchistic fairytale by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s long-lost Korean twin, “Save the Green Planet!” tells the story of Byung-gu, a paranoid young man who kidnaps the owner of a large chemical plant. Not because he needs the ransom, mind you, but because he believes the man may be the key to a conspiracy. A conspiracy to destroy the planet. You see, Byung-gu is not convinced that Kang Man-shik is at all human. There is evidence he is really an alien – a spy in the service of the prince of the Andromeda Galaxy, who is using Planet Earth for his own evil purposes. And unless Byung-gu can get a vital piece of information from Kang before the next lunar eclipse, the planet will be destroyed. Needless to say, the suave Kang denies all involvement with extraterrestrial plots. What’s more, he seems to be immune to Byung-gu’s torture methods, expert and original though they are. And then, just when Byung-gu is beginning to get really frustrated with his prisoner, two inspectors investigating Kang’s disappearance arrive on the scene, which is all the more annoying since the all-important lunar eclipse is only a few hours away. And so the stage is set for two separate but simultaneous and interconnected fights: Byung-gu versus the detectives and Byung-gu versus Kang. Can our determined hero and his loving but none-too-clever girlfriend get Kang to give them the key they need to save the planet, or is the world doomed to destruction…?
As the title states in no uncertain terms, “Save the Green Planet!” is concerned with the environment we live in. Jang makes no bones about it: he is an environmentalist, and his aim is to get us to think about what we’re doing to our planet and our society. Thankfully, he never gets preachy about it. On the contrary. Although he clearly sympathises with the raving but possibly visionary Byung-gu (convincingly played by Shin “JSA” Ha-kyun, who goes from mad to menacing to comic to moving and back again without ever losing credibility), there is no room for moralism. Instead, we are given a wild, occasionally insane comedy full of black humour, absurd dialogue, manic grins, original torture methods, unusual romance and inventive dispatches of unwanted persons. The atmosphere of eccentricity and insanity is well observed, with lots of little details which would not look amiss in a Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. Thus, we have a protagonist who, mad as a hatter, wears a kind of high-tech miner’s helmet to prevent aliens from reading his mind. His love interest, who is not a long-legged babe dressed in black leather but an overweight near-retard with pigtails, goes about wearing a pink tutu that does very little for her figure. And their planet-saving skills are special, too. His is to recognise an alien when he sees one; hers are rope-walking and trapeze-swinging. But while the girlfriend’s circus acts do occasionally come in handy (though not in the way you imagine), her part in the story is mainly to reluctantly help Byung-gu torture Kang, which doesn’t mean simply beating the poor guy (or alien) on the head or pulling out his fingernails, but rubbing his chafed feet with a salve whose vital ingredient is phosphatechlorpheneromone (repeat after me: phos-pha-tech-lor-phe-ne-ro-mone), which weakens the nervous system of aliens and so renders them more pliable. And as if all that weren’t bizarre enough, the two of them have a dog (aptly called The World) who chews human bones (or are they aliens’ bones?), and their house is full of diagrams outlining useful facts about alien weaknesses and theories on Andromeda’s meddling with Planet Earth, mostly inspired by primary-school textbooks on the Ice Age. And so on, ad infinitum.
As you’d expect from a film with so many weird, well-observed details, “Save the Green Planet!” is pretty hilarious – at times hysterically so. There is some deliciously paranoid humour on display, not to mention some ingenious references to “The X Files” and American science-fiction films. At the same time, though, it’s a distinctly Korean film in that the black humour is offset by genuinely emotional moments. Yes, it might be a comedy, but since it is also a tragedy (and a family drama, and a melodrama, and so on), there is place for quiet, moving moments, too.
Fortunately, the transitions from one genre to another are handled well. Admirably well. One never feels one is watching a film too full and ambitious for its own good; instead, one is caught up in the maelstrom of conflicting emotions that is “Save the Green Planet!”, never stopping to wonder why it is that laughter can so quickly turn into compassion. Obviously, it helps that Jang does an excellent job switching from character to character, and that all the characters, in their own clumsy but idealistic ways, fight for what they believe in, even though those things are often at odds. By moving from one idealistic character to the next, Jang makes the viewer switch allegiance, sympathising now with one character, then with another, and finally with them all. For while none of the characters are heroes, none of them are real villains, either, and since they’re all such wonderful eccentrics, one ends up loving them all.
Now it should probably be mentioned here that it all looks magnificent. Korean films have a tendency to suffer from the low budgets on which they are shot; quite often, inventive ideas and well-acted, original stories lose their appeal because they are shot on DV without proper lighting equipment. Thankfully, that is not the case here. “Save the Green Planet!” features Hollywood-standard cinematography – a bit dark at times, but no more than functional. Moreover, it is extremely well edited, moving from drama to comedy and back again as if it were the most natural thing in the world. If there is one moment in the film which deserves special mention, it is the absolutely brilliantly edited montage towards the end of the film where “Galaxy Quest”-like sci-fi-spoof elements and references to Kubrick’s “2001” are juxtaposed with genuine black-and-white footage of World War II victims. It is a jaw-dropping sequence which starts out hilarious, gradually turns grimmer and ends up leaving you quiet as a mouse. After the genius of that sequence, the ending itself is a bit of a let-down, but it doesn’t ruin the film, which remains pleasantly schizophrenic to the end.
MEMORIES OF MURDER
(Written and directed by Bong Joon-ho)
South Korea, the late 1980s. Against a backdrop of violent student demonstrations, black-outs and curfews, a serial killer haunts a countryside town, raping and murdering his victims in a style distinctly his own. The local police force are a bunch of thugs who try to solve the case by planting evidence and beating confessions out of unlikely suspects. Then a young, much better trained detective from the capital arrives on the scene. Not approving of his new colleagues’ methods, he tries to get them to adopt a slightly more orthodox approach, which inevitably leads to friction. Meanwhile, dead young women keep turning up with their knickers over their heads, and both the methodical big-city cop and his startlingly inept local colleagues are clueless.
That, in a nutshell, is the plot of “Memories of Murder”, based on the true story of a string of unsolved murders that rocked South Korea in the eighties, back when the country was still under military rule. It was Korea’s highest-grossing film of 2003, beating both the “Matrix” and the “Lord of the Rings” movies and a heap of home-made blockbusters.
Actually, it is easy to see why “Memories of Murder” was such a hit. For not only is it a classic detective drama (a cross between the new-cop-in-a-strange-police-force movies of the eighties and the serial-killer flicks of the nineties, with some Korean twists thrown in for good measure), but it is a good one – well written, well acted and full of well-observed details and well-timed plot twists that make the film both gripping and hilarious.
Hilarious?
Why, yes. You see, “Memories of Murder” is no ordinary serial-killer flick. Although the search for the murderer obviously forms the emotional core of the story, the film really focuses on the relationship between the policemen, who are antipoles in the best dramatic tradition. Theirs is not just a clash of methods; it’s a clash of beliefs, of backgrounds, of everything. On the one end of the spectrum, you have a bunch of ill-educated country bumpkins whose idea of a thorough investigation is to visit bath houses in order to see if there are men without pubic hair (don’t ask) or to buy tools from a shaman that will enable them to recognise the killer’s face in a pool of mud (don’t ask about that one, either). On the other hand, you have Inspector Seo, the Seoul-based detective who is not only much more intelligent than his rural counterparts, but a graduate of a prestigious university into the bargain, which means a lot in Korea. Inspector Seo, we soon learn, is the Voice of Reason. Not a cool, Eddie Murphy-like cop who teaches his stodgy colleagues that there are other ways to solve a case than the official one, but the other way around: a law-abiding policeman who tries to convince his unscrupulous colleagues that the official way is the official way because it has been proven to work. A detective, in short, who believes in Hard Evidence and gets very frustrated with his colleagues’ less scientific methods, although he tries his best not to be the arrogant, superior prick his colleagues assume he is.
Needless to say, conflicts between Seo and the local cops abound, many of which are very funny. You see, the local detectives are not just slightly unorthodox in their approach, but they are daft. Stupid. They do things which don’t make any sense whatsoever, and they do them so naturally that it’s hilarious. Of course, Seo doesn’t see it that way, but to the viewer (who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of the local cops’ actions) they are the source of many a laugh. Big laughs.
It isn’t just about humour, though. Although there is some deliciously unsubtle, black humour that neither interferes with the dramatic developments of the story nor makes the search for the murderer any less gripping, what lifts “Memories of Murder” above the average serial-killer flick is the sense of frustration that permeates it. There is no big, triumphant capture scene here. The most climactic scenes in the film are not the ones that chronicle the apprehension of the murderer, but the ones which show how utterly frustrating it can be to be a policeman, and how shockingly easy it is for even an intelligent, idealistic policeman to commit a crime when provoked. Two scenes stand out: the one in which the detectives working on the murder case can’t summon their colleagues at the critical moment because the colleagues are busy beating down a student demonstration, and the one towards the end of the film where Inspector Seo discovers, to his utter despair, that hard science (in which he has always been a great believer) isn’t always the answer, either. Seo learns a hard lesson here, and it’s a painful experience, both for him and for the viewer.
Now there will undoubtedly be people who say that with its gloomy night-time photography (which suitably illustrates the state Korea was in at the time), its eighties setting, the intriguing clues the murderer leaves behind and the emotionally fraught ending, the film is a “Seven” rip-off with a typically Asian plotline about the importance of a good education thrown in. These people have a point, although to call “Memories of Murder” a rip-off would be to do the film an injustice. “Memories of Murder” is both funnier and more emotionally involving than “Seven”. True, it lacks the bizarre murders, the corpse which comes to life again and the literary pretensions of “Seven”, but in terms of build-up and climax, it is very much the equal of the American film. What with the added humour and frustration, it could actually be said to be a superior film.
And that’s coming from someone who actually rather likes “Seven”.
Elaine
Awesome. Keep ‘em coming, Elaine. You’re doing a bang-up job as always.
"Moriarty" out.
