Bark­ing Dogs Nev­er Bite

“What a nice day!” says Ko Yoon-ju (Lee Sung-jae), look­ing out his apart­ment win­dow at the begin­ning of Bark­ing Dogs Nev­er Bite. ​“I’d like to go hik­ing and take a nap on the moun­tain.” A lazy, broke human­i­ties grad over­looked for tenure, and a hus­band hen­pecked by his work­ing, preg­nant wife Eun-sil (Kim Ho-jung), Yoon-ju just wants a qui­et life.

The end­less yap­ping of anoth­er tenant’s dog, how­ev­er, is dri­ving him crazy, and so he makes var­i­ous half-heart­ed attempts to kill it, before final­ly lock­ing away the still liv­ing dog that he has stolen in a clos­et on the building’s low­er lev­el, at first unaware – in a pre­cur­sor to the plot­ting of Par­a­site – that there are oth­ers secret­ly fre­quent­ing this base­ment with their own designs on dogs.

Mean­while, Park Hyun-nam (Bae Doona), who keeps books in the building’s office, takes it upon her­self to find who­ev­er is behind a spate of miss­ing dogs, in part because she hopes to escape her own, much greater pover­ty by becom­ing a media celebri­ty. All this is accom­pa­nied by Jo Seong-woo’s light jazz score, lend­ing these cani­ci­dal activ­i­ties an incon­gru­ous­ly breezy feel. As Yoon-ju and Hyun-nam cir­cle one anoth­er, Boon keeps it uncer­tain whether the chase unfold­ing is a roman­tic com­e­dy or an alto­geth­er less erot­ic kind of hunt.

The Kore­an title of Bong Joon-ho’s debut fea­ture, Peul­lan­daseu-ui Gae, trans­lates lit­er­al­ly as ​‘Dog of Flan­ders’, in allu­sion to Marie Louise de la Ramée’s 1872 nov­el. The ref­er­ence is iron­ic, for while ​‘A Dog of Flan­ders’, huge­ly pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial across Asia where it is regard­ed as a children’s clas­sic, tells a sen­ti­men­tal tale of an orphaned boy and his adopt­ed pet, you will be hard pressed to find any sen­ti­ment in Bong’s glee­ful­ly mis­an­throp­ic view of a res­i­den­tial com­mu­ni­ty that is also a micro­cosm of Kore­an society.

“No ani­mals were harmed in the mak­ing of this film,” reads the text that opens Bark­ing Dogs Don’t Bite, but sen­si­tive cynophiles should be warned that sev­er­al dogs are abduct­ed, impris­oned, killed, even butchered over the course of the film, as Bong takes the moral mea­sure of his human char­ac­ters by show­ing how they relate to their ani­mal neighbours.

“Dogs eat bet­ter than I do,” com­plains the building’s old jan­i­tor (Byun Hee-bong), who him­self eats oth­er people’s dogs. ​“Nobody in this coun­try fol­lows the rules,” com­plains Yoon-ju„ who will him­self use a bribe to gain an aca­d­e­m­ic post. Yoon-ju’s pur­suit of the pro­fes­sor­ship, and Hyun-nam’s pur­suit of fame, are real­ly the same phe­nom­e­non – an end­less race to reach the top in a dog-eat-dog sys­tem where cheat­ing rules all and win­ning is nev­er fair.

Their ambi­tions may seem very dif­fer­ent, but Bong sug­gests a strange sym­me­try, even an inter­change­abil­i­ty or per­haps reversibil­i­ty, between these char­ac­ters, as the man who steals and kills dogs becomes the man who owns one and who, swap­ping the red colour of his clothes for the yel­low of Hyun-nam’s, joins forces with her to try and find his own dog before some­body else can kill it.

Much as the build­ing is haunt­ed both by ​“Boil­er Kim”, who the old jan­i­tor says end­ed up dead and buried with­in the basement’s walls after see­ing through the builders’ cor­rup­tion and cor­ner-cut­ting, and by the home­less man (Kim Roi-ha) who drifts unno­ticed through its inte­ri­ors, this film’s very struc­ture both con­ceals and reveals capitalism’s steep downside.

If it is Yoon-ju who in the open­ing scene express­es his desire to hike in the moun­tains, it is Hyun-nam whom we shall see doing just that in the film’s clos­ing sequence. This may well be the only sort of climb­ing for which she is des­tined. In this film, bad, even psy­chot­ic behav­iour is reward­ed, while peo­ple like Hyun-nam receive lit­tle more than than dried radish for their good deeds and decen­cy, and lose every­thing else.

Despite its Eng­lish title, Bark­ing Dogs Nev­er Bite is a mor­dant affair, pre­sent­ing itself as wry­ly fun­ny in its obser­va­tions of human foibles, while in fact expos­ing the cru­el under­bel­ly of ​‘mod­ern behav­iourism’, and – lit­er­al­ly, in its final image – hold­ing up an accusato­ry mir­ror to us view­ers who are part of this iniq­ui­tous society.