Influenza

Classifying Influenza as a horror film, now that I ponder on it, makes the most sense. It's not about necessarily any character build up because Bong Joon-Ho knows there isn't time for that in his manifestation of the randomness and bizarre state of how murder and crimes happen in the world.

There is no explanation sometimes for why someone will just go berserk and just start pummeling another person on the street, though here there is the fact that the man who we see on this downward trajectory us joined by a woman who is equally cuckoo for cocoa-puffs early on, and his film is just a series of horrific acts that is impactful not because of the visceral nature but because Bong never forgets the cinematic form.

Notice how much he wants, as De Palma does when he is getting his voyeuristic side on, to make us see perspectives and spaces and how we have to understand the full geography of a space to get how awful these acts become. There's those split screen images of the man being taken off of the subway, and we don't know at first what is going to happen but our eyes are watching for any sudden move... and then there is LOTS of it.

The longer this goes on it is only one CCTV angle, and now that Bong has in his way trained the audience to know what to look for one recoils especially because of how long he let's some moments play (the guy who gets knocked with the bat in the garage and then gets up and fights back and how that unfolds is the prime example).

But Bong being Bong, there is play in how the tone shifts as well; you know this is an artist who can't help but shift into absurdity as the one guy finds himself in the bank - about to rob it, about to attack, we are waiting in suspense - and it turns out that the bank has a surprise for this man as he is the 20th customer of the day on the bank's 20th anniversary and there is a big celebration (ironically it seems just like the kind of moment Candid Camera made it's bread and butter generations ago). How the guy reacts to that is hilarious - I mean, how else would you react to that?

But then right after this is the punishing climax of the short, which ends in an agonizing act because of just how much Bong is playing around still: how much do the people outside know what's happening is real or staged? Does anyone know? When will someone pop in and say "ah, just kidding, we are filming a short on the security camera." So many of these scenarios play out in very public spaces, and the daring is making us question what we might do if we were seeing such chaos break out.

Or... I mean, a truly macabre work that is only marred by a little confusion early on by something we are meant to see that isnt clear. I'd love to see this in a movie theater one day; watching it via streamed casting from Criterion Channel is one thing, but with excellent picture and Dolby sound? What a filmmaker.

Bong Joon-ho's INFLUENZA was commissioned as part of a 'Jeonju Digital Project', a set of three digitally-shot short subjects p compiled for the 2004 Jeonju International Film Festival. The other participants were Hong Kong's Yu Lik-Wai, and Japan's Sogo Ishii. Bong's standout contribution details the downward slide of an unemployed, and seemingly unemployable, 31-year-old Seoul man (Yoon Je-moon) into a life of increasingly violent robberies. The city's omnipresent CCTV and security cameras capture his every move and, eventually, his every murder, usually in the company of a nasty female companion (Go Su-hee) who's as greedy and remorseless as he is, their spree stitched together by the unseen authorities (a "mosaic documentary" as the director called it in an interview). The title presumably refers to random, similar acts of violence that occasionally and somewhat amusingly break out on the periphery of the main pair's activity. The production's cast is a mix of actors and real, unsuspecting citizens. The short was made after Bong's breakout hit MEMORIES OF MURDER, and prior to his even bigger smash THE HOST, and is very much part and parcel of those and most of his later works. He'd found his groove in features fairly quickly, so his success at channeling and compressing his notions about mankind in general and Korean society in particular into a short subject comes as no surprise. Mostly available via streaming sites years after its release, INFLUENZA finally saw the light of day in 2020 as a standalone DVD release in North America from Grasshopper Film. Regardless of the format, it's definitely worth viewing, but the disc might be better signed out from a well-stocked local library if you have one; otherwise the film and the supplements on the DVD (two press conferences and a teaser trailer) might have been better served as bonuses on, say, the Criterion release of MEMORIES OF MURDER. Either way, it's nice to have it available for those looking to fit a missing piece into their experience with the director's oeuvre.