repeat wrote:warren oates wrote:If there's anything I love about New Korean Cinema and Bong's work in particular it's his deft command of tone and his ability to switch on a dime between seemingly incompatible moments/feelings
Totally agree with this - Bong is definitely one of the contemporary masters of tonal modulation, and
Snowpiercer for me was a return to
Host form in that respect (
Mother, while certainly a great film, is my least favourite Bong by a hair's breadth, downplaying that side of him in favour of a more conventional mystery based on plot and performance)...
Snowpiercer for me is Bong at the top of his game, that is a cinema of pure spectacle peppered with his impeccable flair for tonal shifts and jolts, and his peculiar brand of sarcastic (even cynical here) socio-political commentary. Far be it from me to tell anyone else how to watch their films, but I'm afraid the sort of viewer who has been conditioned to consider "plausibility" and "consistency of tone" as high virtues of filmmaking will get much more than a headache from this film!
Here's where we begin to really diverge in our thinking about this movie, about Bong's talents, etc. Because I don't think that "cinema of pure spectacle" represents anyone "at the top of [their] game." In the past I've thought of Bong Joon-ho as an absurdist author who carefully grounded his film fantasies in concrete realities he saw around him.
Barking Dogs took the idea of people as actors on a civic stage to dark and ridiculous extremes, but at the center of that film was the tension inherent when people live on top of one another, squished into vast, impersonal spaces and expected in all instances to conform to the social schemas posited in front of them. The absurd image of a man asked to conform to every hidden social dictate arrayed in front of him--under such pressure that he is driven to antisocial, dog-murdering mania--is a very believable conceit, in the sense that many of have felt that desperate, homicidal pull when we felt trapped near a neighboring dog that won't shut up.
Memories of Murder is grounded in twin schema––one, that the events the film depicts are inspired by a true story––and two, that the military dictatorship that forms the background of the film exists in recent memory. These two elements allow Bong to flush the film full of slapstick comedy and pungent rural wit and grotesquery. Once again, the fanciful conception of events is given a modifying layer of historical relevance and social observation.
The Host ups the ante considerably, aiming straight at the monster movie genre, but again there is an anchor in human interest and relevance which keeps the fantasy of the picture from feeling simply indulgent. This is imagination drawn out in thoughtful ways, and while the movie borrows many tropes of the blockbuster special effects movie idiom, there are many unexpected virtues of the movie that feel necessary rather than indulgent. The lugubrious but basically credible family at the center of the film is the obverse of the lone man of action that usually abides at the center of these big-budget productions, and the behavior of the family members is coarse and often disturbingly pragmatic, and always hilarious. The central thematic material of
The Host––that South Korea may find need to protect itself even from its allies--is an unusual subject for an action film, and the sympathy that the absolutely inhuman monster provokes as it fights for its own survival is a very unexpected aspect of the film, not rigidly in-keeping with genre traditions.
Those pictures drew their subject matter from concrete, local situations––thus the genre tropes Bong played with and against had a kind of a built-in foil, which kept the films feeling fresh and lucid. Certainly, there is social commentary on display in
Snowpiercer, and absurdist humor. What differentiates
Snowpiercer for me from Bong's earlier films is the lack of that grounding resource, which measures the fanciful absurdity of his premise against my need to find something human and specific to relate to in a movie. Without that grounding element, the theoretical argument about the breadth and limits of socio-economic organization remains frustratingly abstract. The train is essentially an absurd premise––but it is too absurd to be believed, and to sketchily illustrated to sustain its own conceit. I asked before if anyone had written a novel in the almost 20 years they had been on that train, and I wondered whether or not the leisure class had been partying in absurd costumes the entire time because no element of the train is so clearly drawn in the film as to imply that real life had transpired upon the train. This seemed to me a fault of the comic in smaller portion, as well, but the idea that this train has sustained all human endeavor for almost 20 years is hard to credit without a more thorough sense of detail on display.
There is plenty of detail saved for the more outrageous physical pain of the train. The man whose arm is frozen off, the grotesquery with the fish and the axes, the intense physical challenge of the revolution to survive as the train enters a tunnel and the light gives way to darkness, Swinton and the teacher's exuberantly twitchy facial contortions––all of these things inspire Bong's rapt attention (there is, though, the entirely ridiculous gun duel as the train rounds a bend--and that one rang remarkably pointless in its glib falsity, rather than cheeky and cool--
Hard Boiled this is not). And Bong has always combined a sense of gleeful grotesquery in his films with a kind of edgily theatrical mis-en-scene. But Snowpiercer rounds the bend when it places its essential subject matter into the space of about 5 or 6 extended monologues, delivered by different cast members at points where action seems to be a more valuable response to the situation. There is even the sequence near the climax where we get three increasingly prosaic and protracted monologues in rapid succession--where first Curtis, then Nam and then Wilford outline the range of philosophical options open to Curtis at this climactic juncture. These monologues get especially wearisome because they include absolutely all of the background detail of character and history that has transpired on the train. They retrospectively fill in Curtis and Gilliam's motivations; they reveal Nam to be a kind of undercover scourge to his class; and to my mind they show Wilford as a genuinely demented character. I'm not so sure we weren't meant to understand Wilford's motivations as noble, even as we see his compromises (child labor!) as reprehensible. I found I couldn't interpret him as anything more than unhinged. The train is Wilford's idea, after all, and his fascist view of humanity is on display in the succession of cars we visit.
A huge problem for me is that we get all this information in these arbitrary, compact pellets––the monologues are Brechtian in their didacticism, but they have very little of the irony Bong has exhibited in previous films. That irony was based on his intelligent observation of real human conditions, and the multiple levels upon which people may see shared situations in life (Song Kang-ho's outrage when he discovers the scientists who attempted to lobotomize him are blithely holding a cookout next door to the surgery station, for example). And that irony had an ameliorating effect on the strongly didactic dramatic delivery of Bong's earlier films. The irony in
Snowpiercer displaces none of the absurdity of the premise, because it remains loose in the insistently abstract background of the film.
That is the huge hurdle I am unable to surmount in my attempt to appreciate the film: it is the background detail that is absurd in
Snowpiercer, and nothing in the foreground of the film serves to anchor the movie to any sense of the real. The train doesn't function simply as a metaphor; it's also a machine, and the workings of that machine are important to the central themes of the story--but those workings are never elucidated. It's like watching
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with no idea what chocolate tastes like and no concept of the process you might go through to make it. There is nothing to relate to in
Snowpiercer, because the premise of the movie is absurd from the ground up. Everything follows behind that: the performances fall into line based on whether the actors need to A) advance the story, or B) provide pathos, or C) chew scenery. People's motivations for action are barely examined, not only because their motivations are deliberately held back for third-act revelations, but also because their motivations are detachable, and tacked-on for glaringly obvious thematic purposes. Therefore, the acting is either easy to dismiss, as with Chris Evans, accomplished yet annoying, as with Tilda Swinton and Song Kang-ho, or decent but almost undistinguishable, as with Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer. There are a few performances that seem not only bad but also ill-conceived--as with Vlad Ivanov, whose acting sticks out of the picture like a sore thumb. And while the technical and production design of the train was certainly an area of a lot of creative focus, it is not at all rigorously purposeful. The decoration of the train looks very much like it comes from a videogame to me--though more
Gears of War than
Bioshock. The production design of
Blade Runner still dwarfs that of
Snowpiercer because the production design in
Blade Runner provides a vivid, concrete answer to the question of how the people in
Blade Runner live--there is purpose in its background detail, and by comparison, the background of
Snowpiercer is modish and insubstantial. The action of the movie is similarly hollow--it is entirely arranged around keeping the poor people from advancing along the passage of the train (here I was reminded of another video game--
Kareteka--though I suppose contemporary gamers will better recognize a name like
Prince of Persia in this genre of side-scrolling, endless advance upon combat). The physical dangers that stand to stop that advance--shock troops, fish guts, tunnels, ice chunks on the tracks--hold relatively little weight of moral or psychological challenge, a la the impediments to the heroes progress in
The Lady Vanishes and
Shanghai Express (even a somewhat charming clunker like
Horror Express offered greater obstacles for people intent upon reaching the conductor's car). Instead they are endurance tests, designed primarily to wind down the fortitude of the heroes, and so the film takes on the narrative shape of the advancing train, to detrimental effect. Neither of those earlier films I mentioned,
Lady or
Shanghai Express, surrenders to the interminable boredom of a long train ride, but long before
Snowpiercer is over, the range of available movement and action in the film has been restricted to a mind-numbingly inevitable confrontation with Wilford. Initially, I wondered at the possibility that Wilford might not be already dead, and that the train would be kept running on the collective greed of the gluttonous one-percenters at the head of the vessel--but by the end it was clear that Curtis would have to meet Wilford. That he turned out to be a cross between the lightly-worn gravity of Ed Harris and the disquiet of a Dickensian factory-owner was less of a rewarding denouement than one that pitted Curtis against Nam, for instance.
I also have to say that I substantially disagree with the claim that Bong Joon-ho is a master of some sort of sliding tonal structure within his films. Tonal variation in a drama is a basic way to contrast scenes, and many filmmakers reflect that skill in more subtle and illuminating ways than Bong does--I'm thinking of contemporaries of Bong, like Jong-Chan Yoon and Song Il-gon, for instance, and outside of South Korea there are many masters of subtle tonal contrast, like the late Edward Yang, or Fassbinder. warren oates' avatar reminds me that Sam Peckinpah was a real master of tonal contrast in many of his films, and that that tonal contrast came from the sympathy of the performances, from Peckinpah's eye for composition...and only considerably less so from the cutting and pacing of his pictures. The fact that the tonal color of scenes in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are consistent no matter which cut of the film you watch suggest that this is something you create when you film, much more than something you do afterwards. To my eyes, Bong handles tone the way Steven Spielberg handles it--they both possess a sophisticated sense of pace and rhythm within a scene, but they each display an attitude towards tonal construction that is quintessentially Hollywood in its origin, so that tone becomes for them a question of cutting and rhythm, rather than an attitude expressed through imagery and choreography. Bong's interest in absurdity seems to me quite separate from his sense of the tone of a scene--sometimes his sense of tone and his sense of humor intersect, but the relationship is an inconsistent one at best.
Bong always demonstrated a kind of slick sense of scene construction that was a bit at odds with most of his South Korean contemporaries. In the previous films this was easy to overlook, because his observations of his own society were trenchant and surprising. His humor and his original ways of thinking took him past any of the filmmaking cliches he leaned upon in order to build his narrative ideas or construct his scenes.
Snowpiercer is dispiriting for me principally because the anchor is gone, and Bong's skills on this film seem wholly aimed towards a Hollywood model of "international action cinema." The philosophy of the movie feels so abstract as to be detachable from the picture. The acting seems to me the slave of an awkward, stunted narrative, which places action scene and "big ideas" and character development in arbitrary chunks, void of form or feeling. And because the background detail of the film--not just the actual set decoration, but the internal logic of the story--always seems a contrivance of the moment, rather than a carefully considered idea--not much of the flash and bluster of this film seems purposeful or profound. I suppose this has potentially the same audience as a film like
The Avengers does in a lot of places. But it's disappointing to me to see a very talented and intelligent filmmaker fall back almost exclusively on his most commercial instincts. And I feel the need to add that, of all the exquisite French comic books out there upon which to base a movie, this has seemed to me--in the first volume, at least--to be one of the least impressive prospects. I wonder why this one was the one Bong chose.
