Barking Dogs Never Bite

Korean director Boon Jong-Ho directed this film, Barking Dogs don't Bite, his first feature, in 2000.  The movie is an elaborate "shaggy dog story" -- both literally and generically.  A "shaggy dog story" is an intricate narration that can be expanded with as many complications as desired but which remains ultimately (and intentionally) inconsequential.  Typically, a narrative of this sort begins with some kind of event that seems scarcely worth noticing that, then, is elaborated into a complex, seemingly improvised plot -- the generic story is an account of people looking for a lost dog described by its owners as "shaggy", various enounters that occur during the hunt, and, at last, the revelation that the so-called "shaggy" dog is not shaggy at all.  Boon Jong-Ho uses this plot template for Barking Dogs.  The effect is a little like Wong Kar-Wei's Chungking Express with its interlocked stories revolving around a cheap, greasy spoon take-out place and films like Michael Haneke's Code Unknown -- disaffected city-dwellers, each isolated from the others, are entangled together by chance events in a narrative.  The TV program Seinfeld typically exploited plots of this sort.

In Barking Dogs, a frazzled graduate student is tormented by the yipping of a small shaggy dog.  (The story begins in media res and so it takes us some time to unravel the graduate student's motives.)  He steals the small white dog, a kind of furry fuzz-ball terrier, and tries to pitch the animal off the rooftop of the large, anonymous apartment building where he lives.  He can't bring himself to commit this act, nor can he hang the dog by its leash in the basement of the apartment building.  So he locks the dog in an abandoned armoire in the apartment building's basement.  Later, he discovers that he has probably seized the wrong dog.  There is a granny in the building who is drying radish pickles on the roof and she has a Chihuahua with an irritating bark.  The graduate student goes into the basement to rescue the white, shaggy terrier but finds that the apartment maintenance man is cooking the dog on his hibachi.  (Here Jong-Ho arrests his plot and has the maintenance man tell a long  maniacal story about a murdered janitor named "Boiler Kim" -- in this story, Jong-Ho tips his hand that his narrative will be complex, seemingly ghastly, but, more or less, pointless.)  The graduate student, who is badly mistreated by his pregnant wife or girlfriend (she makes him crack walnuts for her, seemingly her only source of sustenance), dognaps the Chihuahua and, ultimately, throws it off the roof of the building.  Two slacker girls who work in a toy store (barely work) and have access to a copying machine meet the little girl whose terrier has been eaten.  The little girl puts up posters everywhere advertising a reward for the missing (and eaten) terrier.  She says that she will commit suicide if her dog isn't found -- but dogs are fungible and, later in the film, we see her dragging another small, and equally irritating, dog on a leash.  The slacker toy-store employees see the graduate student pitching the dog off the roof.  It turns out that the unfortunate Chihuahua belongs to the old lady who is curing pickled radish on the roof top.  The slacker girls pursue the graduate student, hoping to achieve fame in the Korea media by bringing the dognapped to justice.  Meanwhile the graduate student's wife or girlfriend has purchased a dog, another nasty little white dog (a poodle), that she names baby.  The graduate student loses that dog in a fog of chemical spray and the poodle ends up in the clutches of a homeless vagrant who tries to barbecue the small animal but is beaten-up by the slacker girls.  The more attractive slacker girl helps the graduate student as he forlornly (and drunkenly) glues posters showing his missing dog to walls -- there is a distinct erotic tension between the unhappily matched graduate student and the girl, but, true to form, this pseudo-romance goes nowhere.   And, so, it goes -- in the end, the two slacker girls are shown hiking in a woods, a distant forest that can be seen from the top of the Brutalist, concrete skyscrapers and that they have long yearned to explore. The graduate student is now a professor, having achieved his academic goals, although he doesn't seem to be too happy.  All of this is presented in a fluid, brightly lit schematic style.  There are some fantasy interpolations, including the story of another grad student who died when a subway train hit his head while he was projectile vomiting, and a sequence in which the roof-tops of the buildings are crowded with people in yellow hoodies cheering on the slacker girl when she rescues the poodle.  Ultimately, the film is as irritating as is its privilege -- it's a genre that is as irritating and petty as the yapping dogs that are its subject. The film is admirably designed, however, and keeps multiple balls up in the air, juggling the different characters with aplomb.  The problem that the viewer senses in the film's last third is that a narrative that is intended, fundamentally, as an irritant goes on too long -- this sort of story would be best at about an hour's length and the film seems to be, at least, 115 minute, or so, long.  It's an interesting film, but, not good enough to sustain it's length.