In his genre-bending and seemingly nonsensical “Declaration of Idiot”, Lee Chang-ho offers a challenging and jarring satire on the class disparities in Korea of the 1980s. It’s a crazy film in which flickers of brilliancy and almost balletic grace that would make Sorrentino blush are interspersed with a kitschy slapstick humor, that’s an overt callback to the works of Laurel and Hardy. Despite the absurdist tone set by the director early on, the narrative is filled with a degree of despair. The events on screen, even though largely disjointed and hard to follow, offer a daunting portraiture of the Korean society and the growing gaps between the “haves” and “have nots”, fostered by the economic boom the Asian Tiger witnessed from the 1960s until the 1980s.

The film begins with a suicide of a movie director who decides to leap off a building. “People don’t want to watch movies,...