Bong Joon-ho

(On Cable TV, May 2020) What makes an instant cinema classic? What is the difference between an ordinary film and a great film? Those are the types of questions we ask in seeing Parasite—a spectacular blend of plot, character, cinematography, directing, themes and other virtues any great film can have. It certainly takes a gifted filmmaker—in this case writer-director Bong Joon-ho cashing in a reputation forged with an already long list of notable films with one that tops them all. It takes a premise simple enough to hook—in this case, a lower-class family progressively taking over the services for an oblivious upper-class family. It takes a great set and atmosphere—in this case a hypermodern house that’s practically a character in its own right. It takes a thick overlay of thematic interpretations to accompany the narrative—here, among other things, a critique of class exploitation and capitalism. It also takes narrative twists and turns—but telling too much of those would rob viewers of the film’s specific pleasures. Suffice to say that Parasite is exhilarating filmmaking, and it brings something new to the cinephile’s table with its collision of tropes, deep irony, unusual story and class satire. It’s slightly more slow-paced than I would have liked at first, but it steadily gains steam as it goes along. I don’t quite agree with its Best Picture Academy award for a trivial reason (The Oscars aren’t about cinema, they’re about Hollywood) but that shouldn’t take away from the conviction that Parasite is one of the films that people will remember from the 2010s.

(Google Play Streaming, November 2018) If you’re watching a police procedural, there’s a presumption that the criminal will be caught at the end of the movie. Filmmakers can mess with that convention, as they can end a romantic movie with the leads not getting together, but those who do this usually want to make a point and deliberately expose themselves to grumblings from the audience. Memories of Murder is a South Korean crime thriller film intentionally designed to leave audiences unsettled—the 131 minutes-long film is a careful recreation of a 1980s police investigation, but even the investigative breakthroughs don’t lead to a satisfactory conclusion, with an ending that keeps the murders unresolved. It’s adapted from real events, so there’s some veracity here—but it doesn’t make it any less enraging as a movie. [October 2019: In a rare case of reality being more satisfactory than fiction, it turns out that forensic evidence decades after the murders has led to the identification, and later confession of the serial murderer who inspired the film.] Ending aside, writer/director Bong Joon-ho does manage to turn in a competent police procedural—the details are well chosen, there is some character development, various police methods are shown, the sense of time and place is convincing and the film does manage to attain its objectives, even if those objectives aren’t necessarily the satisfaction of the audience. Memories of Murder is one more piece of evidence regarding the vitality of South Korean cinema in the twenty-first century, and a memorable crime thriller in its own right.