Bong Joon-ho’s films reflect on humanity
Cannes winner ‘Parasite’ is rooted in class conflict
LOS ANGELES — Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho was back in Los Angeles on a recent morning in September, on the dizzying stateside tour for his critically acclaimed thriller “Parasite,” when I asked if he’d heard the day’s news out of his native South Korea.
He answered with an exclamation 16 years in the making.
“HE CONFESSED,” said director Bong, wide-eyed with astonishment.
Weeks earlier, Korean authorities had announced the identification of a suspect in the infamous serial killings that inspired Bong’s second film, “Memories of Murder,” the searing 2003 true crime drama he directed at age 34. The slayings had shocked and terrified the country three decades ago, the trail long gone cold.
On this morning in 2019, Korean media were reporting that the suspect had confessed. Now 50, with seven feature films and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for “Parasite” under his belt, Bong was floored by the news.
It had taken so long to glimpse the face of the monster he’d chased onscreen years ago in “Memories of Murder,” a film as much about a killer’s real reign of terror as the failure of justice to find him. The resolution was bittersweet, and Bong admitted he felt conflicted.
“But no matter how complicated I feel, I don’t think it can compare to the people who were actually involved in the case — families of the victims, detectives who struggled to catch the killer and the suspects who were misunderstood to be the killer and were interrogated,” he said. They should be the ones to speak at length before he does, he added.
“I feel very complicated, but I think it’s only a fraction of how much they feel,” Bong said.
He recalled what he used to say while doing press for “Memories of Murder”: “To remember is to punish.”
Resolution is not something Bong might expect to gain from any of the films he makes, but that doesn’t stop him from using them to exorcise the modern anxieties that plague him. Deliciously entertaining genre blenders, his stories tend toward cutting, witty and ultimately humane social critique, twisty puzzle boxes that reflect our world back to us.
His films expose our collective humanity as a dwindling precious resource, from 2006 sci-fi breakout “The Host,” which pits a working-class Korean family against an environmental monster, to 2013’s English-language “Snowpiercer,” the capitalist warfare-on-a-train actioner for which he enlisted Tilda Swinton and Chris Evans. 2017’s Netflix eco-thriller “Okja,” the tale of a girl and her super pig, excoriated the industrial farming complex enough to encourage some viewers to go vegetarian.
“Parasite,” his first fully Koreanmade film since 2009’s mesmeric maternal murder mystery “Mother,” follows a poor but enterprising clan who ingratiate themselves into the lives of a wealthy family with darkly comic and tragic results.
In his fourth film with director
Bong, Song Kang-ho plays Ki-taek, the downtrodden patriarch of the Kim family. Neither he nor his former shot put-champ wife Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) or their grown children, Kiwoo (Choi Woo-shik) and Ki-jung (Park So-dam), can land a steady job. They share a cramped subbasement apartment at the geographical and metaphorical rock bottom of town.
But their lives take a dramatic turn when Ki-woo gets a gig as a private tutor to the snobbishly rich Park family, then scams all the Kims into gainful employ in the moneyed household on a hill.
The concept took hold, as most of them do, over the span of many years in Bong’s mind. In his youth he’d worked as a private tutor to a rich middle schooler, and the memory of entering their upper-class home as an outsider stuck with him longer than the job did.
He started turning over the idea that would become “Parasite” while finishing postproduction on “Snowpiercer,” and that film’s overlapping themes bled into a more intimate, contemporary tale of class, greed and survival. Five years later, Bong took the finished script to Song.
“He always starts telling me the idea three or four years back, and it’s always very gradual,” Song explained. “He never lays out the whole project at once — he’ll only share bit by bit, over meals or over drinks. Even I get very curious as well. … With ‘Parasite’ I was like, ‘What could this film end up being like ?’ ”
Both men describe their relationship as one that never requires much talking or explanation.
“There are always these strange and uncomfortable moments across my films, and I think once those moments go through the filter and amplifier that is Song Kang-ho, they become more realistic,” said Bong, who co-wrote “Parasite” with Han Jin-won.
“They feel more real as they reach the audience. I feel like they gain this persuasive power through Song. Thankfully, Song has never hated the scripts that I write.
“We never fought over characters or certain scenes in the way we analyzed them — it’s always been very natural, like how the breeze flows through trees in a forest. It’s always been a natural flow.”
One of South Korea’s most respected actors, Song said Bong knows his characters so well, he’d often act out scenes for his cast.
“On set he would demonstrate for the actors — ‘This is how you should do it’ — and it’s so funny,” Song said. “The actors would try to imitate and follow what he does, but it’s impossible.
“That’s how good he is at expressing the characters.”