It is fascinating to look back at a filmmaker’s journey— how they started their career, with which film, what ideas they presented and how they have developed those ideas from there with their later projects. As Danny Boyle puts it, “I think your first film is always your best film. Always. It may not be your most successful or your technically most accomplished, whatever. It is your best film in a way because you never, ever get close to that feeling of not knowing what you’re doing again. And that feeling of not knowing what you’re doing is an amazing place to be. If you can cope with it and not panic, it’s amazing. It’s guesswork, inventiveness and freshness that you never get again.”
Since its premiere at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival where it won the coveted Palme D’or, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite had already become a phenomenon. With the wave of the BongHive many were getting introduced to films of Bong with the crime thriller Memories of Murder, the monster film The Host and the science fiction action film Snowpiercer. Still, his debut feature Barking Dogs Never Bite continued to slip through the cracks, like it did when it was released back in 2000. However, now there has been a surge of appreciation for Bong’s debut feature and the film has achieved a cult following.
We all have been irritated by the sounds of barking dogs in our neighborhoods at least once, which certainly doesn’t help when we are in a foul mood. We might contemplate either yelling or throwing stones to stop that noise. But Bong takes it up a few notches in his darkly humorous story about an out-of-work college professor Ko Yun-ju (Lee Sung-jae) who, after being irritated by the sound of barking dogs in his apartment building, resorts to kidnapping them. Park Hyun-nam (Bae Doona), a young woman working at the apartment complex, decides to investigate the matter after she starts receiving notices from the tenants about the missing dogs.
Barking Dogs Never Bite is about Bong finding his voice, by making mundane life spectacular. The soul of the movie is how it captures everyday life and all of the simple mundane things that comprise it, yet Bong is able to turn that mundanity into something fun, crazy, dark and engaging from start to finish. The opening scene of the movie is a forewarning to all animal lovers, which Bong only pushes further through his wicked sense of humor led by the dog-abducting Yun-Ju, the lazy dreaming bookkeeper, her fat best friend, the janitor and the homeless man in the basement.
Ko Yun-ju is tired and frustrated with both his professional and personal life. He thought that if he studied hard, he could easily become a professor but, in reality, he had to bribe his way into a professorial position with money he doesn’t have. His relationship with his pregnant wife Eun-sil (Kim Ho-jung) is strained since she is the sole breadwinner of the house. And to add more to his woes, he is irritated by the constant yapping of a dog. This leads him to take an extreme step that not only starts a chain of events but also karma getting its payback eventually.
Park Hyun-nam is the lazy bookkeeper and custodian of the apartment complex where Ko lives. She spends most of her time daydreaming about becoming famous, like the bank teller who was rewarded for stopping a robbery that she and her equally lazy friend Soon Jang-mi (Go Soo-hee) saw on TV. The perfect opportunity presents itself when she witnesses Ko throw a dog off the roof, but she is knocked unconscious by an opening door. Park’s do-gooder actions put her into compromising positions, resulting in dire consequences and eventually her own downfall. The chase sequence that occurs beforehand between Park and Yun-ju is masterfully directed.
Bong doesn’t stop there with his wicked humor—venturing further by bringing a pet dog into Yun-ju’s life, making him feel like a servant in his own home. Bong presents a metaphorical hierarchy of our society within the apartment complex where the film is set—the fresh feeling of open-air at the top floor, Ko and Park stuck in the middle floor with their endless chase for a better life and the basement where the dark secrets are buried. This early notion of a metaphorical microcosm for societal classes is later perfected by Bong with Snowpiercer and Parasite.
Bong also presents the shift in culture and lifestyle since South Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. People have stopped following the basic rules, as simple as pets not being allowed inside apartment complexes. Yun-ju observes those expensive dogs cuddled by their owners and in his frustration and anger he quotes how those dogs are eating better than him. We see a flip side of it too, simmering in the basement, with Janitor (Byun Hee-bong) who, witnessed by a horrified Yun-ju, pulls out the dead dog then cooks and eats it. The homeless man (Kim Roi-ha) who lives in the basement of the apartment complex later develops a taste for dog meat leading to the film’s climax.
Each character is driven by their own selfish motivations and the film is layered with both dark and lighthearted props. The tonal shift of the movie as it moves forward is the heart of Bong’s storytelling, keeping the audience wide-eyed through such a unique experience. The showcase of the characters’ aftermath presented like an epilogue can be seen in each of Bong’s subsequent films. The overwhelming rush of the film accelerated into a passion, without panic, contains an insight into the inventiveness and freshness of ideas presented by a first-time filmmaker.
Barking Dogs Never Bite shows the genius already there in Bong Joon-ho, who would continue to amaze the world with his unique perspective, using and perfecting the storytelling elements presented here. He takes on such bold subject matter, and adds humor to shifting genres, while giving importance to every character, which shows the sincerity he exhibits with his films. Barking Dogs Never Bite might not be as polished as Bong’s later movies but it surely deserves your time.
Barking Dogs Never Bite was released for the first time in the UK exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema on September 18th.
