![]() But there’s at least one point in the narrative where you wonder momentarily if these memories are actually true and whether he really is a serial killer at all. As Kim sees it, he’s preventing pain and possibly murder being inflicted on other people by killing his chosen victims. His first victim was his father who horribly abused his own wife and family, his second a woman who came to his veterinary practice wanting him to cut open the pet dog she’d killed to extract the jewellery it had swallowed. As he tells it, he only ever killed for a good reason, only people who deserved to die. For example, a flashback early on has the ageing Kim recall his many murders. Unlike Memento, Memoir of a Murderer‘s dramatic structure is not rigorously ordered and indeed can be quite disorientating and confusing at times. Like Memento, Memoir of a Murderer takes place in the subjective experience of a memory-unreliable protagonist. Doting daughter Eun-hee (Kim Seol-hyun) gives him a mobile phone on which he can record messages with his voice as a means of recording important events in his recent past. Just as the protagonist of Memento suffers from short term memory loss and must therefore physically record events so as to have a record of them to which he can refer before taking appropriate action, so too Alzheimer’s sufferer Kim needs a means of recording events so that he can recall them by some method other than his increasingly unreliable memory. They’re plugging into a long cinematic tradition of films dealing with impossible memory and that peculiar subset thereof most notably represented by Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) in which a main character suffers from amnesia or memory loss. That’s indicative of some of the games screenwriter Hwang Jo-yoon (co-screenwriter of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, 2003) and director Won Shin-yun want to play with their audience. ![]() But it’s not clear at the start that this is a flashback, and it’s no clearer at the end when this scene recurs. ![]() In the manner of frame stories or flashbacks in so many films, we return to this sequence towards the end. It’s undeniably a visually striking and arresting starting point. Like so much in this convoluted South Korean thriller, that might be highly significant or symbolic, a metaphor, a journey, a state of mind. ![]() ![]() In a 2003 commentary included on our Memories edition, Kim exclaims, “I was beat up by the Foul King!” referencing Song’s star-making role in the 2000 film of the same name.At the start of Memoir of a Murderer, Kim Byung-su (Sul Kyoung-gu) walks dazedly out of a dark tunnel into a white, wintry landscape. Much to Kim’s surprise, the professional-wrestling-style dropkick by Song that sends the former rolling down a hill was unplanned and full-contact. Bong avoided rehearsals to preserve the awkwardness between some characters, and that initial encounter, a fight, was the very first time the performers worked together. Verisimilitude extended to some performance details, such as the first meeting between Inspector Park Doo-man (Song Kang Ho) and Inspector Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang Kyung). Because the fonts and paper employed in 1986 were no longer in use by the time the movie was filmed in 20, the art department had to source the correct paper stock and design each font by hand, character by character. His art department, led by production designer Ryu Sung Hee, was particularly challenged by his request for newspapers, which are occasionally used in the film to convey information to the viewer. Bong, who has been nicknamed Bongtail by his crew because of his microscopic attention to detail, wanted Memories of Murder to be filled with period-accurate props, costumes, and set dressing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |