Memories of murder wiki10/11/2023 Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder”įurther investigation leads to dead ends and Tae-yoon gets more and more frustrated. Police trying to reenact the crime with the suspect, but all turns into a fools parade revealing their lies. At this point the viewer would expect that Tae-yoon will be the hero who saves the day, eventually solving the crime and making friends with Doo-man. In contrast he looks even more comical than before. Doo-man tries to pick on and fight with Tae-yoon at every instance. He makes some breakthroughs in the case, enraging Doo-man, whose authority and ability is being demeaned in the process. He stands aside watching Doo-man’s methods, often smoking a cigarette or researching some documents in the background. Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyeong) is calm, competent and professional. Meanwhile, a detective from Seoul shows up to help the provincial policemen with the case. Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder” After the torture both policemen and the suspect watch a police drama and eat together. Policemen torturing a mentally retarded suspect. His angry father interrupts this fool’s parade revealing the lies of the police to the unsurprised public. They do extract the confession and parade the “killer” in front of people and cameras, to reenact the crime. Young-koo plays an extremely bad cop, with a mindless, genuine rage and pleasure in beating people. With the help of his fellow policeman Cho Young-Koo (Kim Roi-ha) they torture the poor boy in an attempt to extract a confession. He arrests a mentally retarded boy of the village, who was said to follow the victim around. To close the case as quickly as possible, the detective follows the first lead he randomly gets. However, everybody seems desensitized about the happenings. Here people actually know the victim and the murderer is likely somewhere very near. You might expect that in a big urban city, but not from a rural area. People are curious onlookers, children are playing around in the crime scene with a corpse laying there and the police chief is only thinking about the media portrayal of the story. The most unsettling part while watching the film was how unconcerned the police force and people seem to be about the victim. In this sense “Memories of Murder” is an exemplary piece ofĬertain and very recent trend in South Korean, namely the process of using multiple genres within the same narrative and successfully creating post-modem and accomplished works of entertainment whose main focus is to deal with certain sociological and historical issues. Such mixture of genres is not uncommon in Korean film: Park Chan-wook’s “The Vengeance Trology”, Bong Joon-ho’s later film “The Host”, sci-fi “Save the Green Planet” to mention a few. However, the director Bong Joon-ho doesn’t let the movie slide too much into comedy, balancing it out with horrific realism that gets more and more intense towards the end of the movie. This movie has a lot of such ironic, parody-like scenes that look like a more sophisticated version of Charlie Chaplin’s or Benny Hill’s policemen. However, Doo-man is not a stereotypical “funny loser cop”, everybody else in the station are shown as incompetent, with constant chaos at the station and the crime scene. As camera moves back, we see what the detective sees – dead, naked female body. We follow this man, our main character detective Park Doo-man (Kang-ho Song), back to the police office and witness his flimsy investigation. The chilling contrast of the tranquil surrounding and decomposing body sets the mood for the whole film. As camera moves back we see what he sees – a naked female body, tied up, covered with bugs, starting to decompose. On the back of the tractor an indistinctive man is smoking a cigarette and trying to shoo away the children who are chasing them, shouting “Junk car!” The tractor stops at a drain ditch and the man bends to look into it. A boy is catching grasshoppers, but his attention is quickly captured by a far sound of a tractor. The story starts in the peaceful fields of a rural town in South Korea. The tranquility of the first scene sets a contrast for all horrible events. This review contains spoilers, therefore I recommend watching the movie first. And what a journey it was, revealing a part of Korean history I was not very familiar with and placing the movie in a cultural, historical and psycho-historical context. “Memories of Murder” was telling something more than I initially could comprehend and I went on researching it. It happens with those carefully crafted films that place symbols with a masterful precision to tell a multilayered story. Memories of it kept coming back to me as if trying to solve a riddle. Written: Bong Joon-ho, Kwang-rim Kim, Sung Bo ShimĪfter viewing the movie the first time I was not sure what to make of it.
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