Snowpiercer – Bong Joon-ho

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho – South Korea/USA/France) 126 minutes

Bong Joon-ho, director of the excellent Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother, makes his first foray into English-language film for what is the most expensive South Korean production in history. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a sorry mess. Snowpiercer is based on a mostly forgotten French comic book Le Transperceneige, which started running in 1984, and the production design, which is admirable, borrows heavily from the source material. The opening sequences inform us that in 2014, world governments, in a desperate attempt to offset global warming, smothered the planet in a chemical called CW7, which accelerated the onset of a new Ice Age. All life on Earth has died, with the only survivors having boarded, Noah’s Ark-like, a massive train, powered by a perpetual-motion engine. Now, seventeen years in the future, it travels continuously across the Asian, European and African landmasses on a circuit that had been built by its megalomaniac industrialist owner, one Mr Wilford.

The train is divided according to a binary class system, with those at the head ruthlessly suppressing the proles in the tail. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this division, other than arbitrary pauperisation in the interest of Wilford’s holistic belief of constant order – the underclass does not appear to be retained to do any work, be it slave or indentured. The tail-dwellers, living in squalid, cramped misery, mount a new revolt – all previous ones have been savagely put down – masterminded by Gilliam (John Hurt), a crippled Gandalf-type figure, and led by Curtis (Chris Evans) in which they hope to get to the head of the train and take the ‘sacred’ engine. On the way they enlist the help of train engineer Namgoong (Bong regular Song Kang-go) and his daughter Yona (Ko Ah-sung), both of whom are addicted to Kromul, a drug made from industrial waste that is hugely popular in the front of the train.

Blocking their way is a fearsome army of security guards, led by Franco Elder (Vlad Ivanov – the abortionist from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) and overseen by Mason (Tilda Swinton as a weird cross of Margaret Thatcher with Nora Batty). The first disappointment of Snowpiercer is it doesn’t have anything to elevate itself above your run-of-the-mill apocalyptic drama, even though it clearly fancies that it does. The backstory remains as flat as it does on the page – comics can get away with short-hand like this, films need to flesh things out a bit more. The information that is divulged about the train’s history comes far too late in the film, by which time its possible dramatic impact is vitiated. It is also, for all the grisly scenes of axe murder, and talk of horrific living conditions, not a very disturbing film. Rarely do we get a real sense of menace, and even then, it mostly comes by way of the wordless killer played by Ivanov, whose character is pretty cliched anyway.

The dialogue, despite being worked on by New Yorker Kelly Masterson, is seriously hokey and embarrassing, with Swinton in particular being given some of the most cringe-worthy: ‘Water comes in the mouth, not through the bum’, when she explains how the engine absorbs snow for the train’s water supply. Chris Evans, who played Captain America in The Avengers, is far too lightweight a presence, and too wooden an actor, to carry a film as heroic leader. There are a few efforts at satire, such as a scene where kids are indoctrinated by a cheery schoolteacher (Alison Pill), but these are flat and one-dimensional. Snowpiercer has to recommend it some good production design and well-choreographed action sequences but it is for the most part catastrophically inept. Here’s hoping the talented Bong Joon-ho soon gets back to something smaller in scale and avoid the bombast on display here.

Pietà – Kim Ki-duk

Pietà (Kim Ki-duk – South Korea) 104 minutes

An opening title card to Pietà announces that this is Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film. Having watched it, the only question I can ask myself is ‘how has he been allowed to make films for so long?’ Pietà is a travesty of crassness, emotional short-cuts and the jejune conviction common to people who just aren’t as bright as they think they are – its title alone is the sort of gauche pretentiousness familiar from the international art world. None of this is terribly new in Kim’s work – his films have for years, with a few exceptions, been a dreary trawl through art-house sadism. Now he has started winning awards at major film festivals (Pietà won the Golden Lion at Venice – more of which later), which is likely to give a worrying imprimatur to his very inconsiderable oeuvre.

Pietà follows a sadistic (why of course) debt collector Lee Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), a man with seemingly no ties to society (Kim often addresses the inconveniences of social reality by ignoring it altogether). Lee Kang-do’s modus operandi is to make his debtors sign an insurance policy and then maim them, often using their own tools, himself recouping the dividend. Anyone with a passing familiarity with insurance companies (or has simply seen Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity) will find the credibility of this ruse quickly strained. But such factitiousness is par for the course in a Kim Ki-duk film.

One day, a woman, Jang Mi-sun (Jo Min-su) appears on Lee Kang-do’s doorstep, claiming to be his mother. His initial reaction is to rape her (ah, don’t you love the edginess of art school graduates?) but she hangs around and insists upon cooking for him and even following him around on the job and helping him out. She also manages to convince him that she is her mother, which doesn’t prevent him from cutting a lump from her leg, cooking it and making her eat it. It’s all pretty nasty stuff, embalmed in a general misanthropy that would make Michel Houellebecq, Larry Clark or Gaspar Noé blush. I could accept the misanthropy if it wasn’t executed in such an obviously cack-handed way. Michael Haneke is often accused by his detractors of engineering his scenarios in a laboratory, all the easier to infuse the work with his own disgust at his subjects and, by extension, humanity as a whole. It is not an accusation without foundation, but, compared to Kim Ki-duk, Haneke is very much an Organic misanthropist, a free-range miserablist. Nothing in Kim Ki-duk’s films rings true. Every scene, especially the ones of more wrenching violence, appear channelled directly from Kim’s unconscious. It’s a suffocating feeling to have.

So how did a film like Pietà win top prize at Venice? Well, it is not unprecedented for film festivals to reward bad films. By many accounts, Kim’s film was a compromise award due to festival rules forcing the Michael Mann-led jury to choose which awards to give to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which picked up best director and best acting awards. Anderson’s film was vastly overrated in my opinion, but would have been a far more worthy recipient than Pietà or most other films in what was generally a mediocre festival line-up. Kim Ki-duk has managed to fashion an international name for himself largely because he came to prominence at a time when South Korean cinema was gaining an international audience. Kim’s films straddle the divide between the outré violence of the likes of Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho and the more contemplative films of Hong Sang-soo and Lee Chang-dong. That is probably enough to scramble the signals of critics and festival judges alike.

Two Asian Films

The Taste of Money (Donui Mat) (Im Song-soo, South Korea) 115 minutes

You get the sense that Im Song-soo, in his seventh feature, knows exactly what he is doing, even if it might leave many who watch it flummoxed. Im bemoaned the critical panning The Taste of Money received at Cannes last year by suggesting foreigners could not understand the intricacies of its satire on Korean business and privilege. That may be so but he is pulling his work further into the realm of highly-polished shlock, after his quixotic 2010 remake of Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid. (That reworking of the film considered South Korean cinema’s landmark work was comparable to, say, David O. Russell having a crack at a new Citizen Kane.)  

The Taste of Money continues, in a loose way, the story of The Housemaid, with the children from the family grown up (this is referred to in one scene and Im himself has confirmed this). The central character is Joo, the young private secretary to Yoon, head of the powerful Baek business family. He organises hookers for visiting businessmen and accompanies Yoon on money-laundering missions, on which his boss openly encourages him to grab wads of cash for himself - ‘everyone else does’. The Baek household is a den of iniquity of Caligulan proportions. Yoon is bedding the Filipina maid, his wife Geum-ok (played by the brilliant Yeon Yeo-jeong - a regular for Im Song-soo as she was for Kim Ki-young before him) seduces the much younger Joo, later admitting it was ‘practically rape’. Meanwhile their divorced daughter, Nami, is herself preying on the secretary. Her brother, Chul, is in and out of prison, carrying the can for the family’s transgressions of the law.

What the film lacks in narrative sophistication, it makes up for in its visual palette. It is a rich, if at times sickly, confection, with a superbly designed set captured in an array of masterly deep focus shots and Dutch Angles. Im is a deft stylist and at his best can produce some irresistible cinema, such as in The President’s Last Bang, which dramatised the 1979 assassination of dictator Park Chung-hee (father of current president-elect Park Geun-hye) quite audaciously, as a black comedy. It had all the verve of early Scorsese and de Palma combined. But where that film was focused and, its socio-historical resonance, even for a non-Korean, quite easy to decipher, The Taste of Money is an heaving opaque mass that yields little to the uninitiated. It is strange that Im Song-soo’s invocations of Korean history (also seen in his 2006 adaptation of Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Old Garden) travel better than his forays into broader satire. Like ‘Gangnam Style’, there is enough in The Taste of Money to amuse an international audience but to get anything out of it, you sense that knowing a bit more about Korean society would help.




 


Mundane History (Jao nok krajok) (Anocha Suwichakornpong - Thailand) 82 minutes

There is much in Mundane History, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s debut feature that reminds you of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The Thai director’s film came first though, winning the Tiger award at the 2009 Rotterdam Film Festival and, shockingly, failing to get a European release until now. The mundane history of the title tells of the relationship of a bourgeois student from Bangkok, being cared for at his parents’ home by his male nurse from the provinces, after being seriously injured in a car accident.

 The film’s central story is filmed with great sensitivity, the camera lingering on its elegantly framed subjects as if to embalm them in their own loneliness and frustration. But it knows its limits (the title is itself an admission of this) and the story is not going anywhere your common-or-garden buddy movie hasn’t gone before, or, indeed, the more recent French convalescent/minder two-hander Intouchables. So Anocha opts to recast her narrative through some simple formal inventiveness. Aided by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular film editor Lee Chatametikool, she shuffles the scenes disconcertingly, having Pun, the nurse, chat familiarly, to the staff of the house, before later being introduced to them. Somjai, the young cripple, also regains the use of his legs at one point but we cannot tell if it is a scene from the future or a flashback to before the accident. The ploy could have been confusing but instead it summons intrigue, interrogating the viewer about what it is they expect from such a, well, mundane narrative.

If a recourse to non-linearity gives Anocha some wriggle-room with her very ordinary subject matter, she doubles the formal breaches with scenes that look like a very lo-fi version of the cosmic sequences in Malick’s later, overblown, Palme d’Or winner. While Malick overreaches grossly with a biological history that is far more mundane that the domestic drama at the heart of his film, Anocha is more cautious, and more coy. Her abstract scenes are explained by their being filmed on a trip by Pun and Somjai to a planetarium, even though she does allow herself more formal flourishes in the film’s closing moments. These, depending on your point of view, appear either tacked on or a shrewd underpinning of the workaday tale we have just witnessed. One thing you can say though is that, Mundane History, while being a relatively conventional arthouse film, is experimental in the truest sense of the word in that its director takes risks with her narrative. If it works, well and good; if it doesn’t, the rest of the film is sufficiently strong not to suffer by the experimentation. And Mundane History is, in many ways, a fine film, by a director who surely has many more ahead of her.