February 18, 2008
The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 2: Bong Joon-Ho's "The Host".
Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, in their book Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, write that South Korea's relationship with the United States, much like that of the U.S. and the Philippines, vacillates on the love-hate continuum. "Through military and civilian contacts," they write, "the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder. Material desire and moral approbation, longing and disdain, have been twin responses to many of the trappings of American culture...."
One wonders what they would have thought of Bong Joon-Ho's The Host (2005), one of the finest movies I saw last year. (Come to think of it, it shouldn't be too difficult to ask.) Monster movies are said to be symbolic of anxieties burbling up from the depths of a murky id, writ large: postwar fears of a rampant industrialism (Gojira), nuclear annihilation (also Gojira), the savage Other (King Kong), Communism (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), untrammeled adolescent sexuality (The Exorcist), or the simple money-driven compulsion to destroy New York City again (Cloverfield). The Host needs no metaphor to hide this fear of the "reactionary intruder": the monster here is a paranoid, militarized American chauvinism gone awry, the teratological result of the deliberate dumping of formaldehyde bottles into the Han river. (Something also happens to the protagonist three-quarters of the way through the movie, which I can't reveal, but how much of him (and what is done to him) represents the Korean body politic is not clear.)
The Host is Bong's third feature film, if I'm counting correctly, and like the first two, he takes a well-worn genre (the police procedural, the urban yuppie comedy) and injects it with unsettling social critique. (Memories of Murder is actually a finer, more nuanced work, but I saw it the year before last. Incidentally, practically the entire cast of Memories appears in The Host in various configurations, which, I swear, already feels like a full third of the entire Korean film industry.) But Bong's forte is the way these films slip uncomfortably into different emotional registers: thus the incongruity of a perfectly-timed pratfall (there are two), or the slapstick of a grief-stricken family collapsing clumsily to the ground and hounded by camera-bearing reporters.
But enough about analysis. The Host is genuinely frightening, and Bong knows how to deliver the thrills in the classic monster movie tradition. The second time I saw the film, grown men in the theater were screaming like little girls. (On my third viewing, I was still holding my breath during an entire sequence -- let's just say it involves a girl, a boy, and a tail.) It's also grimly funny -- with visual gags involving squids here and there -- but it's not funny in the same, schlocky way that American (or British, or Australian) horror-comedies are. Bong has a way of undercutting the sober scenes with humor -- if only to make the genuinely horrific scenes even starker.
But the personal, as they say, is also about the political, and Bong's decision to focus on a family unit (rather than, say, a group of attractive college students on vacation) is a wise one, as it adds an emotional heft to the movie. (Contrast this, for instance, with the young interchangeable heroes' inexplicable decision to return to midtown Manhattan in Cloverfield, to save some woman I barely remember.) Our protagonist -- the perpetually sleeping owner of a food stand, portrayed by the always good Song Kang-ho as something of a simpleton -- is motivated by nothing less than the rescue of his daughter, whom he has witnessed being abducted into the water by the monster. Despite its horror movie trappings, the emotional core of the film, seen most eloquently in its quiet scenes, is a simple family reunification. There's one such scene right in the center of the film: a quiet, haunting, one-minute scene that says more about grief than words could express.
Posted by the wily filipino at February 18, 2008 12:46 AM