1995 saw the release of David Fincher’s Seven, and since my first viewing of that film I’ve been unable to watch serial-killer dramas the same way. Which is disappointing, since Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is a top-rate crime-thriller, complete with flawed detectives (including the wise albeit damaged outsider), a gruff police chief, a slew of innocent victims, and a killer whose intelligence is monstrous and undeniable. Additionally, the landscapes and crime scenes are filmed with the same unyielding beauty, and the killer’s calling cards—rain and an old song played on the radio—continually render the detectives inefficient, which adds an air of growing, unstoppable desperation to a genre that usually ends with the bad guy getting caught.
by Adam Balz | Source: Palm Pictures DVD
11 Feb 2007 1:57 PM | Comments (4)
Wow – small world. I started to do a short review of this movie yesterday. I’m glad to see that it’s getting around. The first hour and a half of this film is very compelling and crafted exceptionally well. The characterizations make the film. Unfortunately, during the last half, it succumbs to the clichés of the “crime formula” and (I suspect out of “respect” for the real victims – and families of the victims) it strikes a somber tone near the end that makes it (overall) an uneven experience. The outlandish delight of the first half is overshadowed, even annulled by the gravity of the serial murderer’s appearance and apprehension.
Even the shenanigans of the detectives gets a bit too serious for any comic effect in the second half, which I assume is Bong’s intention in the first half, anyway. For instance, the brawling scene at the inn instigated by a drunk Detective Cho Yong-koo, who is frustrated after being punished by the sergeant for his violent tendencies is uncomfortably serious. It strikes a tone that doesn’t match the rest of the film. All of the detectives have an obvious edge, but none of them seemed pathologically dangerous until this scene. It certainly undermined the terror that the serial killer brought to the latter half of the film.
It may seem that I’m being nit-picky but I think it’s a serious flaw to an otherwise exceptionally entertaining crime film.
It may seem that I’m being nit-picky but I think it’s a serious flaw to an otherwise exceptionally entertaining crime film.
Not nit-picky in the least. Actually, the ending struck me as just Bong not knowing how to close a factual and still-open-for-investigation storyline; I’d never considered the unevenness to be the result of cliches or even respect on the part of the filmmaker (which, I’ve realized, is a foreign concept in Hollywood these days). I look forward to your future thoughts, in addition to those already stated, and I must add that the most uncomfortable moment for me was the “exit” of the detective’s key witness just after the inn brawl, which I won’t spoil for anyone who’s never seen the film.
I haven’t seen this or any of Bong’s films yet, but doesn’t this tendency to wildly vacillate between different tones/genres seem to be a mainstay of South Korean films in general? I’d stop short of making a cultural generalization about it, but this interest in playing with multiple generic clichés and shifting back and forth between seriousness and silliness seems to be shared among some of the major recent Korean exports. (Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is a great example of this, though arguably most of Hong Sang-soo’s films do this, too.) What’s more, this tendency seems to be heightened in a lot of “true story”-based films from South Korea: The President’s Last Bang leaps to mind here, as do (though I haven’t seen them) Memories of Murder and the huge blockbuster Welcome to Dongmakgol (which, on paper, has an extremely suspect premise). As accounts of Korean history, Dongmakgol and The President’s Last Bang interest me most here, as treating history as farce is about as antithetical to major Hollywood historical epics as one can get. This, one is tempted to theorize, is precisely the point and perhaps why South Korea has become (and remains) one of the few countries in the world in which home-grown products out-perform imports from the US.
treating history as farce is about as antithetical to major Hollywood historical epics as one can get.
Well, it certainly is. But Hollywood’s approach is hardly a standard-bearer in my eyes. I hope I’m not so conditioned to the Hollywood approach that it has defined (or had a defining influence on) the aesthetic of any personal enjoyment of film. (Frankly, I think other art forms have been far more influential in defining that.)
But there does seem to be something inconsistent or off-putting, not to mention mildly disturbing, about this tendency in the films from South Korea that we’ve mentioned. I’m not sure if it’s the perspective toward life (particularly life’s tragic elements) that I find disconcerting or simply the brand of irony in all the films mentioned that I find too stark. The irony in these films is far more agressively employed than in crime films from The West (let’s leave “Hollywood” alone for now).
Tyree
14 February 2007
3:18 PM