Blu-ray Review: Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder on the Criterion Collection

In his 2003 breakout film Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho forges an extraordinary tapestry of tones and metaphorical patterns, turning a police procedural inside out. No moment in this film is accorded conventional weight. Torture scenes are audaciously staged as slapstick, placing us in the blinkered mindsets of the detectives perpetrating them, while moments of office research and investigation intermingle with passages of beautiful and brutal expressionism, as well as droll workplace shenanigans. Such wild tonal swings mirror the chaos of life, and they would become a Bong trademark.

What Bong achieves in Memories of Murder, and what has recently eluded the auteur, save for the first half of Parasite, is a puckish, melancholy comic tone that doesn’t undermine the reality of the characters and the gravity of the narrative. The three detectives at the center of this film are all-too-believably human: simultaneously vile, buffoonish, poignant, and even occasionally heroic. The clash of their personalities initially suggests the sort of inter-departmental conflicts that are traditional to police thrillers—Park (Song Kang-ho) is a small-town nitwit, Cho (Kim Roe-ha) is Park’s thuggish enforcer, and Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) is the big-city intellectual—but Bong continually tweaks our expectations. In fact, the endless tedium and terror of tracking an elusive serial killer and rapist of young women gradually causes the detectives’ personalities to merge and even switch. And Bong allows their unmooring to subtly stand in for the anxiety of South Korea at large.

Memories of Murder opens in 1986 in a rural area of Hwaseong, a city in Gyeonggi Province some 30 miles south of Seoul. The first images are of a vast and lovely sun-kissed rice paddy, and of a young boy (Lee Jae-eung) capturing a grasshopper. The scenes are idyllic and nostalgic, a sensation that Bong quickly dispels. Park is soon riding into the field on a jalopy tractor that the boy and his friends ridicule—the first of many suggestions of the police force’s lack of funding and ineptitude. The corpse of a bound-up young woman is discovered in a ditch that’s been covered with plywood (the film’s most terrifying image, which is saying something here) and, briefly, we see a grasshopper on the woman’s face that appears to disappear by a trick of the light glinting off the mirror that Park is using to peer into the ditch.

This unsettling, truly blink-and-miss-it moment illustrates Bong’s gift for metaphor. In one image, the grasshopper is victim, caught by the young boy, while in another it signifies an elusive predator. Connect the two images and it’s implied that the grasshopper is a menace created by society, and, furthermore, that the general populace is better equipped to handle it than authorities. Meanwhile, Park and the boy continue to mock one another, a moment that’s allowed to be funny, further complicating the fear, the desolation, the violence, and the visual poetry of the sequence with the absurdity of everyday life.

This sort of robust, emotionally thorny atmosphere—in which awful things can be weirdly funny, in which funny things can be weirdly awful—is rare in American filmmaking. The American who readily springs to mind as a master of this kind of disequilibrium is Robert Altman, and there’s something decidedly Altmanesque in one of Memories of Murder’s most extraordinary sequences: the investigation of another murder in a field near train tracks. The chaos of the proceedings, orchestrated by Bong with a composer’s finesse on multiple planes of focus, suggests the three-ring circus of Altman’s M*A*S*H, and serves a similarly satirical purpose, showing a governmental power spinning out of control. In this maddening, despairing, and hilarious set piece, law enforcement is too inept to take control of the murder site, allowing the public to voraciously destroy any potential evidence.

With the case understandably going nowhere with this leadership, the overconfident Park relies on rumors and superstitions, attempting to frame various suspects for the crimes, torturing them in the sort of medieval basement that’s said to have been common of South Korean police districts of the time, as the country was still in the grip of dictatorship. Bong doesn’t stint on the brutality, but he doesn’t over-emphasize it either; indeed, the casualness of these scenes is more chilling than the violence, showing Park, Cho, and eventually Seo’s ease with authoritarianism that doesn’t even serve a purpose.

Bong adds resonant comic fillips to these moments as well: After beating a traumatized and mentally impaired young man, Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), they treat him to lunch and laugh with him at a TV show. Other suspects share Park and Seo’s names, suggesting doubles who’re separated from the protagonists only by social station. As the poet and novelist Jim Harrison once wrote, “It is deceptively easy to think we’re normal when we’re not.”

Correspondingly, Bong shows how easy it easy to fold an authoritarian existence into our lives, which arises as the film’s true subject. Civic defense drills, during which people turn out all the lights in their homes and seek shelter, are a regular element of life here in preparation for a potential North Korean attack, and they routinely stymy the central murder investigation. Another murder isn’t prevented because the police are too busy quelling a protest for democracy. Like Fritz Lang’s M, Memories of Murder vividly dramatizes how hideous crimes are but a symptom of a society’s disease. The killer personifies and parodies macho aggression, beating the police, and by extension the government, at their own limited game. Tellingly, the film’s most perceptive detective, a woman named Kwon (Koh Seo-hee), is mocked, sexualized, and set out as bait in order to trap the monster hidden in plain sight.

Image/Sound

According to the text included with the package, “this new 4K digital restoration was undertaken by CJ Entertainment, and was supervised by cinematographer Kim Hyung Ku and approved by director Bong Joon Ho.” Before watching this disc, I hadn’t seen the film in at least a decade, but I recall it boasting an earthier, more muted color scheme. This transfer essentially reimagines Memories of Murder by turning it into a symphony of pristine blacks and greens and browns and shadows that intensifies, and subjectifies, an already quite dread-inducing film. The sunlit outdoor scenes are also sharper than before, with well-balanced background and foreground clarities that underscore the virtuosity of Bong and his collaborators. The disc’s audio, a Korean DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, is just as eerily detailed, emphasizing the film’s lonely score, experimental bridging of scenes with sound effects, as well as the neurotically heightened diegetic noises.

Extras

This stacked collection of supplements offers a full portrait of Memories of Murder as both a cultural critique of South Korea and a sublime formal accomplishment. Two archive commentaries from 2003, one with director Bong Joon-ho and many of the film’s other craftspeople, the other with Bong and the central actors, include fascinating and extremely specific discussions of shaping, filming, and performing each sequence. Meanwhile, a new commentary with critic Tony Rayns provides crucial context on the conflict between South and North Korea as well as the former’s blossoming democracy in the 1990s. In a new interview, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro exquisitely analyzes the film’s visual techniques as well as its gender themes, and another new featurette with film scholar Jeff Smith correspondingly dives into the film’s accomplished use of sound. A new interview with Bong, conducted by critic and translator Darcey Paquet, gauges his reaction to the discovery decades later of the real-life killer, Lee Chun-jae, who’s quite similar to the character most likely to be the culprit in Memories of Murder. Other odds and ends round out the package: deleted scenes with optional director’s commentary, TV spots, a teaser and trailer, a leaflet featuring an essay by critic Ed Park (which includes more present-day commentary), and Bong’s 26-minute student film Incoherence, which boasts his prodigious sense of composition and pacing.

Overall

Bong Joon-ho’s audacious drama is quite the formal meal, and Criterion has fully honored and even redefined the film’s robustly imagined, terrifying, and humorous aesthetic.