![]() ![]() Later, the detectives find themselves unable to call upon a garrison to help catch the killer due to them being busy suppressing yet another demonstration. In one short sequence relatively early on, we bear witness to our detectives in one of the many brutal confrontations that took place between police and student protesters across the nation throughout this period. Though the violence of the police in the film is initially presented as slapstick, it’s indicative of the widespread, state-sanctioned violence that plagued the country in the aftermath of 1980’s Gwangju massacre. In typical Bong fashion, this ideological conflict is exploited for maximum comic effect – Detective Park tries everything from going to public baths to look at men’s pubic hair to consulting a mystic for help with the case – but Bong is the master of the tonal tightrope walk, and accordingly, this humour is rooted in a tangible sense of frustration and despair that eventually comes to consume the whole film as its main characters sink further and further into obsessive desperation, making sure that the horrific nature of the violence at the heart of its story never leaves our minds.Īdding to this is the attention Bong gives to the political situation at the periphery of the narrative – the South Korean military dictatorship of the 1980s. Enter Seo Tae-Yoon (played by Kim Hyang-Sung), a big-city cop sent to help from Seoul whose methods differ drastically from Park’s, with his derision of the former’s reliance on folk wisdom, his assertion that ‘documents never lie’ and his nagging insistence on paying close attention to the evidence at hand. ![]() ![]() The film concerns itself mainly with Park Doo-Man (played with typical bravura by regular Bong collaborator Song Kang-Ho), a local detective claiming to have ‘shaman’s eyes’ who stumbles upon the first of the murdered girls and finds himself, alongside his partner, woefully out of his depth, as it becomes apparent that the tried and tested small-town cop method of ‘catching criminals with your feet’, forging evidence, and beating confessions out of any suspect you can find doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny when dealing with a meticulous and methodical serial killer. Memories gives a loosely fictionalised account of the investigation into the Hwaseong serial murders, a series of rapes and killings that occurred between 19 – particularly notable for two reasons, one being that they were the first serial killings South Korea had known, the other being that, until a year ago, they had never been solved, with the mystery remaining in the public consciousness for decades. But Bong has also proven himself capable of comparatively more grounded, low-key works (‘comparatively’ being the key word here – this is still the man who made Chris Evans slip on a fish), such as 2009’s Mother, a taut, oedipally charged thriller about a mother trying to clear her son’s name after he’s accused of murder and, of course, Memories of Murder. The director’s most commercially successful releases tend to be those where he’s at his boldest and most bluntly allegorical, from The Host’s monster-as-product-of-American-Neo-Imperialism to Snowpiercer’s train-as-capitalist-class-structure and Parasite’s more refined, vertical reinvention of the same central metaphor. ![]() On a level of pure formal control, Bong is undoubtedly one of the true masters of his generation – his gift for painterly compositions and narratively forceful staging is akin to that of Kurosawa, whilst his brutally efficient cutting, intricate plotting and sense for cinematic rhythm calls to mind Hitchcock – but Bong consistently backs up this technical precision with an attention to thematic and emotional detail that, combined with his now infamously anarchic approach to genre convention, renders him a singular force in the landscape of modern cinema. Of course, a meteoric rise to fame like this yields countless new fans desperate to find out what else the director has to offer, and to answer that very question Curzon Artificial Eye had released into cinemas nationwide – before the second lockdown’s untimely interruption – Bong’s breakout (and, I’d argue, best) film: 2003’s Memories of Murder. As a film fan, it’s always satisfying to see one of world cinema’s leading auteurs make a break into the mainstream, especially when it’s for a work as urgent and accomplished as last year’s Parasite. Perhaps the last, if not only good thing to happen this year was the ascension of Korean director Bong Joon-Ho from cult film legend to global cultural icon. ![]()
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