By Neil Archer
Okay, so it’s not really a case of ‘We told you so,’ but we did come close. Bong Joon-ho’s unprecedented Oscar win for his film Parasite at last night’s Academy Awards surprised as many people as it delighted. The latter especially, in my case. As someone who’s been teaching Bong’s films for several years –The Host has been a staple on Keele’s Global Cinema course since it started back in 2015 – it’s gratifying to see such recognition for the Korean filmmaker.
But what is it about Bong’s films that deserves such attention? And if, like quite a few people this Monday, you’re wondering who Bong Joon-ho is, well, here’s a few things to note.
Bong is often considered as part of the han ryu, or ‘Korean wave’: the rise in global popularity and recognition of Korean cinema (and culture more generally) since the end of the 1990s. Bong’s breakout film, Memories of Murder (2003), was made the same year as Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), which would win the Grand Prix prize at Cannes under Quentin Tarantino’s presidency. Like Park’s, Bong’s films frequently deal with the class structures in Korean society, though Bong also tends to focus on the country’s difficult history. Memories of Murder looks at the incompetent way a small-town police force deals with a serial killing spree, all set against the backdrop of the country’s military dictatorship past and violent student unrest. The Host (2006), meanwhile, is a monster movie in which the real enemy is not the giant mutant fish lurking in the Han River, but rather the semi-occupying American military; a feature of South Korean society since the Korean War hostilities ended in 1953.
Like other recent Oscar-winners Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, Bong has been adept at moving between ‘genre’ movies and more low-key, intimate films (he followed The Host with Mother [2009], another film focusing on provincial police corruption and wider cultural malaise). But like those other two filmmakers, his approach to genre is playful, if not altogether subversive. Like Memories of Murder, The Host mines unexpectedly black comedy out of its narrative premise, as its ill-equipped and dysfunctional family try to save their daughter. In Bong’s hands, monster attacks, and even mass grieving, become the source of incongruous comic moments. And what’s more (*spoiler alert*), don’t expect Bong to give you the familiar happy ending.
In a world where hyper-kinetic camera movement and editing is the default stock-in-trade, meanwhile, Bong’s stylistic preference for long takes (something he also shares with Cuarón) distinguishes his work. Though in Bong’s case, unlike in some other films, it doesn’t feel like a director showing off. Rather, as in the scene of bungled forensic investigation in Memories of Murder, it just feels the natural way to depict the chaos and comedy of everyday actions and procedures.
Also like Cuarón and del Toro, Bong has negotiated the world of ‘Hollywood’ in an astute way. While he hasn’t helmed Harry Potter movies or superhero franchise films, Bong has made crossover films, drawing on international casts. Bong adapted the apocalyptic Snowpiercer (2013) from a French graphic novel, and cast Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton alongside his own lead actor of choice, Song Kang-ho. Bong was also one of the first high-profile filmmakers to use of Netflix to produce and distribute his work, with Okja (2017); a science-fictional satire on the meat industry, which moved between Korea and the USA. As with Cuarón’s Mexico-city set Roma (2018), Parasite is a return for the director to a more domestic subject: the corrosive impact of capitalism in the modern Korean state.
Bong in this way is typical of what I’d call the ‘global auteur’ operating in the modern, globalized film industry: someone who, like Cuarón and del Toro, manages different scales of project, but who also uses more mainstream films and conventions to increase their visibility and pulling power. Not only do they then have the clout to make more varied, personal films: when they make these ‘smaller’ films, they really get noticed – which can hardly be a bad thing.
Given the enduring issues around representation at the Oscars, and its very existence as Hollywood’s celebration of itself, we might ask of course whether Bong and Parasite need this kind of award recognition. In this case, we should say yes. I’ve always been uneasy about the way the Academy Awards offers its annual sop to those films ‘Not in the English Language’, as if this were some sort of secondary category. Parasite, as was expected, won this category. But unlike any other film before, it went on to win the big prize too. This was something many expected last year for Roma, which in the end was beaten to it, controversially, by Green Book. In an awards regularly accused of being out of step with history, then, awarding Bong’s film is something of a paradigm shift – and hopefully not just a tokenistic anomaly.
film keele 