Hitting close to home (Barking Dogs Never Bite)

After watching the South Korean director Joon Bo's film "Barking Dogs Never Bite", I couldn't help but reflect on how close this film hit to home. This is an occasionally funny and frantic film that details the madcap and increasingly desperate means that an aspiring professor uses to address a barking dog problem at this apartment complex. Of course, this problem serves as a point of transference for others problems that are afflicting him, principally among them the fact that he is treated in a humiliating way at home and he is becoming increasingly desperate in his attempt to secure tenure.

I have seen previous films by t his director, and I have found them to be quirky but also, at times, profoundly insightful. This film veers a little more towards comedy, and we are somewhat shocked a certain points by the extremes to which the character will descend. In an early scene he is shown actually dangling a dog off the roof, then attempting to hang it in the basement, before actually locking it in a closet. Evidently there are vestiges of a formerly more cruel and dispassionate attitude towards dogs in the Korean sensibility. Such depictions would have immediately elicited howls of condemnation on the part of Westerners.

The friendship between the two young women is affecting. They are an odd pair, one of them a heavy girl who runs a small shop and the other a thinner girl who seems to have difficulty taking in her world but who has fantasies of achieving fame and recognition. They comprise a bickering pair that recalls other archetypal pairs, such as the bickering, wandering laborers in Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress".

There are various turns in this film and, eventually, the aspiring professor is humanized. He comes to regret his extreme actions as he disposed of various dogs, the loss of one of which causes the death of an elderly lady. (Yes, it does seem extreme, but then again, I can also appreciate that pets are part of very strong relationships for many people, and this seems to drive home the point about our societies in which people fix on things and other objects rather than on the more stressful ordeal of talking to other people.)

In the end, we have a more serene, somewhat regretful character, and we have a beautiful scene where the mousy girl who had been lpursuing the dog kidnapper is able to achieve another one of her dreams, that of hiking in the mountains.

And cats and dog will still serve as substitutes for real human relationships, and will serve as the point of transference for problems that afflict us. (As I write, there is a very annoying dog barking in my back yard, as well as the far-off crowing of a rooster.)