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Barking Dogs Never Bite
(Flandersui gae)

Screening on Film
Directed by Bong Joon-ho.
With Lee Sung-jae, Bae Doo-na.
South Korea, 2003, 35mm, color, 106 min.
Korean with English subtitles.

Bong’s feature debut offers a stinging critique of the economic divide between the haves and have-nots in an offbeat story about an aspiring unemployed professor, his pregnant yuppie wife and a young woman working in the office of his apartment complex, who has no particular ambitions or, seemingly, much of a future. A yapping dog in the building sets off the twisted chain of events that ultimately draws them together in a pitch-black comedy that pairs its bleak view of human nature with a score of jazz and cool electronica. Contemporary Seoul is depicted as a media-crazed city saturated with corruption at the higher levels, a society given over to the venal and the banal.

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