Amateur Recommendation Hour: Barking Dogs Never Bite

Today’s recommendation is a film that I was torn whether or not to actual recommend to a wide audience. If I’m being completely honest due to depictions of animal cruelty (that’s your content warning by the way) I probably shouldn’t. Even if no animals were harmed during it’s filming I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult to watch in those moments and compared to others I have a pretty high tolerance for fictional depictions. Ultimately I wanted an excuse to talk about one of my favorite directors whose filmography I just completed watching all of. So I'm going to do it, because I really do think you should watch this underrated black comedy masterclass.

I know, I’m not perfect and I apologize for any deception I may have created with the “recommendation” bit. If it sounds interesting to you, by all means, but this is more for me than it is for you this time. (read until the end I promise it comes full circle).

Barking Dogs Never Bite, directed by Bong Joon-ho in his directorial debut no less (yup, I finished at the beginning!) is a wry, darkly humorous, and light-hearted piece that I believe wants us to look in the mirror (that he brilliantly provides *MASSIVE WINK*) and heartily laugh with ourselves and all of the bits and bobs that make us this strange, complicated, inconsistent, and somehow top of the food chain species. Let it all out. 

[insert infamous Final Fantasy 10 scene here]

An out of work college professor who is particularly annoyed with the sounds of barking dogs in his apartment complex decides to take drastic measures to ensure his peace and quiet. A young woman who is a bookkeeper at the complex who decides to investigate reports of missing dogs in and around the area. Their stories begin to intersect in unexpected ways.

The cinematography and shot framing of this film is so subtly parallel at times if you blink you might miss it. Drawing between both of the remarkably well fleshed out main characters and their struggles as well as their character traits and flaws. It is in as much of the unspoken that we discover who these people are and what their financial struggles mean to each of them and how it impacts them as people as we do when they are communicating directly with each other. Slow, methodical, and direct in its pacing and camera movements, it mimics the pace of the film, punctuated by moments of kinetic energy that serve as narrative catalysts. 

It is undoubtedly rough around the edges and may be a bit lethargic in it's opening third  but in the green, almost sickly looking apartment complex, grimy and lived in equal measure, in which most of the film takes place, the ethical and moral apathy that occurs isn't so far from that which we are familiar with in each of our own real lives. Though it's light-hearted tone interspersed with varying genres of upbeat music doesn't create the kind of weight that another filmmaker might have unwittingly trifled with. The soul, worldview, and expressions of this film are as idiosyncratic and individual as it is eccentric and painfully real and it is in that way that it is undoubtedly the origin story of its auteurist creator.

Bong creates an extremely nuanced and subtle symmetry between the main participants in the narrative sense as well. On the surface these people seem like they have nothing in common, we are given the opportunity to dig deep enough to see that, while their exterior motivations may seem different, ultimately their methodology isn’t as different as maybe we’d like to think. Are any of them really “bad” and “irredeemable” after all even if some of their behavior is borderline psychotic? Why are the kinder actions rewarded with far less than those that are not? It’s an unfortunate symptom of the world we live in. In some cases we really aren’t so different from the animals beneath us on the food chain.

And these ideas feed into my own interpretations of this work and what it truly represents at its core. That it is an examination of human morality with an emphasis on highlighting the hypocrisies of our own individual moral codes and creeds. No one in this world is some flawless moral arbiter. While we all believe our own belief systems to be righteous and for the best of intentions, in some cases the basis for a handful of these beliefs don’t have the most altruistic origins. That doesn’t even come close to making us cold and calculated egomaniacs. In fact if anything it makes us remarkably human.

Thank you so much to Mr. Bong and his remarkable works that have been thought-provoking, meaningful, and on a personal note have meant so very much to me and many others. I cannot wait to see where you go next, I’m sure it will be something darkly humorous, morally grey, and outstanding all in equal measure.