Bugonia Can't Possibly Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Based On
Aegean surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for distinctly odd movies. His original stories defy convention, such as The Lobster, where single people are compelled to form relationships or risk transformed into creatures. Whenever he interprets another creator's story, he frequently picks basis material that’s pretty odd too — odder, perhaps, than his cinematic take. Such was the situation for last year's Poor Things, a screen interpretation of author Alasdair Gray's delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, liberated spin on Frankenstein. His film is good, but to some extent, his specific style of oddity and the novelist's balance each other.
Lanthimos’ Next Pick
Lanthimos’ next pick for adaptation also came from the fringes. The basis for Bugonia, his newest project alongside leading actress Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean genre stew of science fiction, black comedy, horror, irony, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It's an unusual piece less because of what it’s about — even if that's far from normal — rather because of the frenzied excess of its mood and storytelling style. The film is a rollercoaster.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
There must have been something in the air across Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to an explosion of stylistically bold, boundary-pushing movies from a new generation of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted concurrently with Bong’s Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those two crime masterpieces, but it’s got a lot in common with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, pointed observations, and defying expectations.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! is about an unhinged individual who abducts a business tycoon, thinking he's a being from the planet Andromeda, plotting an attack. Early on, this concept is played as farce, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as a charmingly misguided figure. Together with his naive acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (the actress Hwang) don slick rainwear and absurd helmets adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and wield ointment in combat. But they do succeed in seizing drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and taking him to a secluded location, a makeshift laboratory assembled at a mining site amid the hills, where he keeps bees.
Shifting Tones
Moving forward, the film veers quickly into increasingly disturbing. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and subjects him to harm while declaiming absurd conspiracy theories, ultimately forcing the innocent partner away. Yet the captive is resilient; powered only by the certainty of his innate dominance, he can and will to endure awful experiences just to try to escape and lord it over the disturbed protagonist. At the same time, a comically inadequate manhunt to find the criminal begins. The cops’ witlessness and clumsiness echoes Memories of Murder, even if it’s not so clearly intentional within a story with a narrative that seems slapdash and unrehearsed.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, fueled by its manic force, trampling genre norms without pause, long after one would assume it to find stability or lose energy. At moments it appears like a serious story regarding psychological issues and overmedication; at other times it becomes a symbolic tale regarding the indifference of the economic system; alternately it serves as a grimy basement horror or an incompetent police story. Jang Joon-hwan applies equal measure of intense focus throughout, and the performer is excellent, while Lee Byeong-gu keeps morphing from visionary, lovable weirdo, and frightening madman as required by the movie’s constant shifts in mood, viewpoint, and story. One could argue this is intentional, not a mistake, but it can be quite confusing.
Intentional Disorientation
It's plausible Jang aimed to confuse viewers, of course. Like so many Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by an exuberant rejection for stylistic boundaries on one side, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality in another respect. It stands as a loud proclamation of a society finding its global voice amid new economic and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to see the director's interpretation of this narrative from a current U.S. standpoint — possibly, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream for free.
