Bugonia Isn't Likely to Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychological Drama It's Inspired By
Greek surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in extremely strange movies. The narratives he creates veer into the bizarre, like The Lobster, a film where single people need to find love or risk transformed into creatures. When he adapts someone else’s work, he often selects basis material that’s rather eccentric also — more bizarre, possibly, than his cinematic take. That was the case regarding the recent Poor Things, a screen interpretation of Alasdair Gray’s delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, sex-positive spin on Frankenstein. His film stands strong, but in a way, his particular flavor of oddity and Gray’s neutralize one another.
Lanthimos’ Next Pick
The filmmaker's subsequent choice to bring to screen similarly emerged from far out in left field. The basis for Bugonia, his latest team-up with leading actress Emma Stone, was 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean mix of styles of sci-fi, black comedy, horror, irony, psychological thriller, and police procedural. It’s a strange film not primarily due to its plot — although that's highly unconventional — but for the frenzied excess of its tone and storytelling style. It’s a wild, wild ride.
A Korean Cinema Explosion
There likely existed something in the air in South Korea at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was part of an explosion of daringly creative, groundbreaking movies from a new generation of filmmakers like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those celebrated works, but it shares many traits with them: extreme violence, dark comedy, sharp societal critique, and genre subversion.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! revolves around a troubled protagonist who abducts a chemical-company executive, convinced he is an extraterrestrial originating in another galaxy, with plans to invade Earth. Early on, this concept is played as broad comedy, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a lovably deluded fool. He and his childlike acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) sport slick rainwear and bizarre masks adorned with mental shields, and wield ointment for defense. But they do succeed in abducting inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (the performer) and bringing him to a secluded location, a ramshackle house/lab assembled at a mining site in the mountains, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Moving forward, the story shifts abruptly into something more grotesque. The protagonist ties Kang into a makeshift device and inflicts pain while spouting outlandish ideas, finally pushing the innocent partner away. Yet the captive is resilient; fueled entirely by the belief of his own superiority, he can and will to undergo terrifying trials to attempt an exit and dominate the clearly unwell protagonist. At the same time, a deeply unimpressive investigation for the kidnapper gets underway. The officers' incompetence and lack of skill recalls Memories of Murder, although the similarity might be accidental in a movie with plotting that comes off as rushed and unrehearsed.
Unrelenting Pace
Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, driven by its own crazed energy, defying conventions without pause, long after one would assume it to find stability or run out of steam. Occasionally it feels as a character study on instability and pharmaceutical abuse; in parts it transforms into a fantasy allegory on the cruelty of capitalism; in turns it's a claustrophobic thriller or a bumbling detective tale. The filmmaker applies equal measure of hysterical commitment in all scenes, and the performer shines, while Lee Byeong-gu constantly changes between savant prophet, charming oddball, and frightening madman in response to the movie’s constant shifts in mood, viewpoint, and story. It seems it's by design, not a mistake, but it might feel pretty disorienting.
Designed to Confuse
The director likely meant to confuse viewers, mind. Similar to numerous Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for stylistic boundaries in one aspect, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality on the other. It’s a roaring expression of a culture finding its global voice amid new economic and cultural freedoms. One can look forward to see the director's interpretation of the same story from contemporary America — perhaps, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream at no cost.
