Bugonia Couldn't Be Weirder Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Adapted From
Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is known for extremely strange movies. The narratives he creates are weird, like The Lobster, in which singletons are compelled to form relationships or risk transformed into creatures. Whenever he interprets existing material, he frequently picks source material that’s rather eccentric as well — stranger, maybe, than his adaptation of it. This proved true regarding the recent Poor Things, a screen interpretation of the novel by Alasdair Gray wonderfully twisted novel, an empowering, sex-positive spin on Frankenstein. The director's adaptation stands strong, but partially, his unique brand of eccentricity and Gray’s cancel each other out.
Lanthimos’ Next Pick
The filmmaker's subsequent choice for adaptation similarly emerged from the fringes. The original work for Bugonia, his recent team-up with star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean mix of styles of science fiction, dark humor, terror, satire, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It’s a strange film less because of its subject matter — even if that's far from normal — but due to the wild intensity of its mood and directorial method. The film is a rollercoaster.
The Burst of Korean Film
There likely existed something in the air within the country in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a boom of stylistically bold, boundary-pushing movies from fresh voices of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn’t on the same level as those celebrated works, but it shares many traits with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, bitter social commentary, and genre subversion.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! focuses on a disturbed young man who kidnaps a corporate CEO, believing he’s an extraterrestrial hailing from Andromeda, intent on world domination. Early on, that idea unfolds as farce, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a lovably deluded fool. Alongside his childlike circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (the actress Hwang) sport plastic capes and ridiculous headgear adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and employ ointment as a weapon. But they do succeed in seizing inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and bringing him to the protagonist's isolated home, a dilapidated building assembled on an old mine amid the hills, which houses his beehives.
A Descent into Darkness
Hereafter, the narrative turns into increasingly disturbing. Lee fastens Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while spouting outlandish ideas, finally pushing the gentle Su-ni away. However, Kang isn't helpless; powered only by the certainty of his innate dominance, he can and will to subject himself terrifying trials just to try to escape and exert power over the clearly unwell protagonist. At the same time, a notably inept investigation for the kidnapper begins. The detectives' foolishness and incompetence is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, though the similarity might be accidental within a story with a narrative that seems slapdash and unrehearsed.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, driven by its own crazed energy, trampling genre norms underfoot, well past one would assume it to either settle down or falter. Sometimes it seems like a serious story on instability and excessive drug use; sometimes it’s a metaphorical narrative about the callousness of the economic system; alternately it serves as a dirty, tense scare-fest or an incompetent police story. Jang Joon-hwan maintains a consistent degree of intense focus in all scenes, and the lead actor is excellent, while the character of Byeong-gu constantly changes between savant prophet, charming oddball, and terrifying psycho as required by the film's ever-changing tone in tone, perspective, and plot. I think that’s a feature, not a mistake, but it can be quite confusing.
Purposeful Chaos
It's plausible Jang aimed to unsettle spectators, indeed. In line with various Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for stylistic boundaries on one side, and a genuine outrage about man’s inhumanity to man on the other. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a culture establishing its international presence amid new economic and cultural freedoms. It promises to be intriguing to see how Lanthimos views the same story from a current U.S. standpoint — perhaps, a contrasting viewpoint.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online without charge.
