Bugonia Isn't Likely to Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Based On
Greek avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for extremely strange movies. His unique screenplays veer into the bizarre, like The Lobster, where singletons are compelled to form relationships or face transformed into creatures. When he adapts someone else’s work, he frequently picks source material that’s rather eccentric too — odder, possibly, than the version he creates. Such was the situation for last year's Poor Things, an adaptation of the novel by Alasdair Gray delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, sex-positive take on Frankenstein. The director's adaptation is good, but to some extent, his particular flavor of eccentricity and the novelist's balance each other.
His New Adaptation
Lanthimos’ next pick for adaptation was likewise drawn from the fringes. The basis for Bugonia, his latest team-up with leading actress Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean genre stew of sci-fi, dark humor, terror, irony, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It’s a strange film not primarily due to its subject matter — though that is far from normal — rather because of the frenzied excess of its atmosphere and storytelling style. The film is a rollercoaster.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
It seems there was a certain energy in South Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to a surge of daringly creative, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those two crime masterpieces, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, bitter social commentary, and bending rules.
The Story Develops
Save the Green Planet! is about a disturbed young man who abducts a business tycoon, thinking he's a being originating in another galaxy, plotting an attack. At first, the premise is presented as slapstick humor, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), comes across as an endearing eccentric. Together with his innocent entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) don plastic capes and bizarre masks adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and employ balm as a weapon. However, they manage in kidnapping intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and taking him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a ramshackle house/lab constructed in a former excavation in a rural area, home to his apiary.
Shifting Tones
From this point, the film veers quickly into ever more unsettling. Lee fastens Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while declaiming bizarre plots, finally pushing the innocent partner away. Yet the captive is resilient; driven solely by the conviction of his elevated status, he can and will to subject himself awful experiences to attempt an exit and dominate the disturbed protagonist. At the same time, a deeply unimpressive investigation for the abductor begins. The detectives' foolishness and incompetence echoes Memories of Murder, though the similarity might be accidental in a film with plotting that seems slapdash and improvised.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, propelled by its manic force, breaking rules without pause, long after you might expect it to calm down or run out of steam. At moments it appears like a serious story on instability and overmedication; sometimes it’s a symbolic tale regarding the indifference of corporate culture; in turns it's a claustrophobic thriller or an incompetent police story. Director Jang brings the same level of intense focus in all scenes, and Shin Ha-kyun shines, although the character of Byeong-gu constantly changes from savant prophet, endearing eccentric, and dangerous lunatic depending on the narrative's fluidity in tone, perspective, and plot. I think it's by design, not a bug, but it may prove pretty disorienting.
Designed to Confuse
Jang probably consciously intended to unsettle spectators, indeed. Similar to numerous Korean films during that period, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for genre limits partly, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man in another respect. It’s a roaring expression of a culture establishing its international presence during emerging financial and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to observe Lanthimos' perspective on this narrative from contemporary America — possibly, a contrasting viewpoint.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online without charge.