Aegean avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on highly unusual movies. The narratives he creates defy convention, like The Lobster, in which unattached individuals need to find love or face being turned into animals. In adapting someone else’s work, he frequently picks basis material that’s quite peculiar also — more bizarre, possibly, than his cinematic take. That was the case regarding the recent Poor Things, a screen interpretation of the novel by Alasdair Gray delightfully aberrant novel, a feminist, liberated spin on Frankenstein. His film stands strong, but partially, his specific style of oddity and Gray’s balance each other.
The Director's Latest Choice
The filmmaker's subsequent choice for adaptation also came from the fringes. The basis for Bugonia, his newest project alongside star Emma Stone, was 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean genre stew of science fiction, black comedy, horror, irony, psychological thriller, and police procedural. The movie is odd not so much for what it’s about — although that's decidedly unusual — rather because of the chaotic extremity of its tone and storytelling style. It’s a wild, wild ride.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
It seems there was something in the air across Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, was part of an explosion of audacious in style, groundbreaking movies from a new generation of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It was released alongside the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn't as acclaimed as those celebrated works, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, sharp societal critique, and bending rules.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! focuses on a disturbed young man who captures a business tycoon, believing he’s an alien hailing from Andromeda, with plans to invade Earth. Initially, that idea unfolds as slapstick humor, and the young man, 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 naive acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (the star) don plastic capes and absurd helmets fitted with anti-mind-control devices, and employ ointment in combat. Yet they accomplish in abducting intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to the protagonist's isolated home, a makeshift laboratory constructed on an old mine in a rural area, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Moving forward, the film veers quickly into ever more unsettling. Byeong-gu straps Kang onto a crude contraption and inflicts pain while ranting absurd conspiracy theories, ultimately forcing his kind girlfriend away. But Kang is no victim; driven solely by the certainty of his own superiority, he can and will to undergo awful experiences in hopes of breaking free and exert power over the mentally unstable protagonist. Meanwhile, a notably inept police hunt for the abductor commences. The cops’ witlessness and clumsiness recalls Memories of Murder, even if the similarity might be accidental within a story with plotting that appears haphazard and unrehearsed.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! continues racing ahead, propelled by its manic force, breaking rules along the way, long after you might expect it to either settle down or run out of steam. Sometimes it seems like a serious story about mental health and excessive drug use; in parts it transforms into a symbolic tale on the cruelty of the economic system; in turns it's a claustrophobic thriller or an incompetent police story. The filmmaker applies equal measure of hysterical commitment in all scenes, and Shin Ha-kyun delivers a standout performance, although the protagonist constantly changes among savant prophet, charming oddball, and dangerous lunatic depending on the film's ever-changing tone in mood, viewpoint, and story. One could argue this is intentional, not a bug, but it can be quite confusing.
Designed to Confuse
The director likely meant to unsettle spectators, indeed. Like so many Korean films during that period, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from an exuberant rejection for genre limits in one aspect, and a profound fury about man’s inhumanity to man in another respect. It’s a roaring expression of a culture finding its global voice during emerging financial and artistic liberties. It will be fascinating to see how Lanthimos views the original plot from contemporary America — possibly, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online for free.
