Korea II. Joon-ho Bong

I hesitate to conclude that anything about Ki-duk Kim is representative of Korean cinema.

Joon-ho Bong, on the other hand, gave American audiences a crash course with The Host in 2007, a bucking and bizarrely hybrid Godzilla update that made us wonder at the general disrespect for genre boundaries outside of the West. (I don't know if I'll ever be ready to handle Bollywood.)

More interesting than this stylistic trend is the way Bong spins traditional subject matter — monster attack in The Host, police procedural in Memories of Murder — to engage concerns of his former study, sociology. Prominently there is a frustration, sometimes resentment, over Korea's backwardness and dependence on the US. Memories of Murder, a true story set in 1986, relates the bungled investigation of the country's first serial killer and the trauma endured by a public already strained by perennial Cold War. The film is a cousin to Fritz Lang's M and Spike Lee's Summer of Sam.

I called it a procedural, but in fact the drama revolves around the nonexistence of standard homicide procedures and up-to-date forensics in Korea at the time. Instead the detectives improvise (often tragicomically); they coerce, assault, fabricate, speculate and augur, getting nowhere. When finally they catch a break and obtain a DNA sample it has to be mailed to the States for proper lab analysis...weeks later the results come back inconclusive. The detectives, having hung their last hope overseas, are devastated. Note a pointed alteration Bong has made to the facts of the case: In reality the lab work was done in Japan, not the US.

Bong is among many South Korean directors, I gather, who are also expressing a cultural concern over the status of the family unit in a country divided and militarized, where massive and violent demonstrations have become a national pastime. (Imagine the cultural upheaval of the American 1960s contemporaneous with civil war.) To native audiences this theme would be among the most salient features of The Host (top record holder at the Korean box office), although I admit it went over my head on first viewing.

For his contribution to Tokyo! (2008), a triptych of fucking insane short films by non-Japanese directors, Bong hones in on the social phenomenon of hikikomori — extreme shut-ins — imagining a not too distant future in which virtually all urban Japanese have withdrawn to isolated abodes. The premise is better than the execution, but it reinforces my impression of Bong as an entertainer and commentator.