"Memories of Murder" (2003)

Bong Joon-Ho has already achieved contemporaneous fame with the fiscal triumph of his 3rd film, 괴물 (which translates directly to 'monster', but for obscure marketing reasons was instead distributed in the western hemisphere as The Host - the highest grossing film thus far in Corea's history), but it was his 2nd film which will stand as the chief hallmark of his formidable talents. Director Bong has meticulously studied the hollywood manner - economy in emotion as well as in production value - , and has been able to dilute the overweening aspects of the typical hollywood production with the solvent of his culture's historical and situational character. It is not that there is a pretension to emulate hollywoodisms that signals in the film a rival ambition to include itself among the stock of serial killer genre films already well-known, but that the photography, score/soundtrack, editing, acting, scenario, etc. are assembled so finely that its minute eccentricities leap out. The right measure comes across, especially judicious cuts that keep the rhythm of the film at a tight pace. The film as such does not aim to transcend its self-imposed constraints - it still by the end announces itself as a genre-specific film - but Memories of Murder is as good as such films can be: it strategically & allusively implies historical critique with the use of its background material (a period in Korean history - from the late 1980s to the early 1990s - in which social unrest was still persistent, and national alarms sounded through the villages at the slightest spark of protest - an atmosphere that would provide suitable stimulus to a shockwave of unsolvable, baffling serial rape-murders that the story centers around) - yet it never attempts to dislocate the main story's drive from its trackground (which was one of the weaknesses - though to others one of the strengths - in Director Bong's The Host, which for better or for worse chose at crucial junctures to directly comment on the background historical matter.) The sincerity shown in the characters' motivations (the definition of a character taken here to mean a composite study of his/her thematic motivation), especially the humor that arises quite naturally at very unpredictable episodes - along with the dramatic cohesion of the ensemble acting (in which notably, Corea's best living actor, Song Kang-Ho, dominates the fore) - provide unceasing entertainment in every quarter of the film. The most successful aspect of the film - besides the professional calculation of its photography and editing - is that its range of emotions (in which fear and wrath are effortlessly juggled in an overall comedy of errors) are so variegated as to achieve moments of downright hilarity in spite of the scenario's bleakness - there is perhaps no other genre film of its kind to have mastered these shifts of emotion with so much deftness. The film is brutal - as anything in the demoralizing & fantastically inhuman world of C.S.I. can be - yet it has the ability to suddenly arouse humor and camaraderie in a few cuts. The distinction lies in the sincerity.

The film begins on a premise of unknowability - and ends on the same note: Song Kang-Ho's character, Det. Pak Doo-Man, stares into the vacuum of the same drain pipe at the beginning of the film as at the end, with the one difference that at the initiation a young female body is found stuffed in there; at both scenes children are present (children a chief principle & motif in the corean macrocosm) indicating of course the savage contrast of the murder(s) with the village's blanket of innocence; the crude & familiar emotions of vengeance, justice, and perplexity highlight the two gateways into & out of the film: the 'memories of murder' are the blank memories of fear, of not knowing why such contrasts may exist in so sunlit and rustic an area (the first shot of a vast wheatfield in the stark rays of the sun create this impression with forceful introduction.) In any case the impression is one of craft rather than of any illumination exterior to the film's professional impetus. The lack of overarching reflection or commentary (those that are included are meager enough as to allow the action to move along) is here a virtue rather than a fault. In a comedy of errors the asides are always in the form of slapstick/action-heavy contemplations - a gun pointed at a head, a photograph thrusted in a stranger's face, much rain and much much vexation, arms thrown & fists raised, etc.
...
Cf. David Fincher's Se7en - an obvious comparison that Director Bong no doubt had in mind, if we are to perceive the emphasis on color photography, and the slight similarities in compositional structure used in both films; fittingly, it has been surmised that Fincher may have seen Memories of Murder, and was sufficiently inspired to revisit the same material in Zodiac, the 6th major film that he began after Memories of Murder had already premiered; there is the extra parallel in the fact that Fincher's 2nd major film was Se7en, just as Memories of Murder was for Director Bong.