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Nov 20, 2008 3:17 PM CST |
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It’s a dark and rainy night. Oh Dae-su is bailed out of jail where he is held for being drunk and disorderly. The friend who bails him out disappears once they are on the street. Oh Dae-su is finally headed home. He remembers it’s his daughter’s birthday. But he doesn’t make it. He is kidnapped. When he wakes up, he is in a cell at an unknown and undisclosed location. He spends the next fifteen years of his life there. His only companions are TV, deep-fried dumplings, and his own conscience, which he wracks for a semblance of understanding of what’s happened to him. To try to keep himself sane, he practices boxing and works to develop a killer punch. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of. But it gets worse. His jailers frame him for the murder of his wife. If he ever escapes, Oh Dae-su will be a wanted man. Fifteen years have passed—for him slowly, for us who are watching the movie rather quickly. Then, he is suddenly and inexplicably set free. He’s had fifteen years to think of revenge, but it comes neither instantly nor easily. Oh is given money and a cell phone by a street bum. He wanders into a sushi bar, collapses, and is taken home by Mido, a slightly weird waitress. With her help, Oh finds out his grown-up daughter is living in Sweden. Through a series of improbable coincidences, Oh tracks down the restaurant that made the dumplings that were his daily dinner when he was imprisoned. From there, he discovers the organization that kidnapped him. With the help of fists hardened by fifteen years of practice, he takes vengeance on his jailers. In a grotesquely violent scene, he fights back with the help of a hammer. But this is just the beginning of the complicated plot of Oldboy; the violent adventures have only started. In comes Oh’s tormentor, played by Yu Ji-tae. He gives Oh five days to unravel the mystery, otherwise he will kill every woman that Oh has ever loved, including his waitress-girlfriend Mido. This leads Oh on a new journey, mixed with flashbacks, but his tormentor has more terrible shocks in store for him. Oldboy is a Korean film directed with great self-assurance by Park Chan-Wook. It was an enormous box-office hit in Korea. Oldboy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival when Quentin Tarantino was the president of the jury, and understandably became the Tarantino favorite—he promoted and pushed so that it won the Grand Prix of the Jury award. It is very stylish, fast-paced, full of bizarre and hairpin plot twists and extreme violence that will make you cringe. This ranges from Oh chomping down a live octopus to the forcible removal of teeth with a hammer, and a sequence with a pair of scissors and a tongue. In between, there is plenty of traditional knock-you-out fighting, and lots of blood—violence that may be cartoonish in character, but is sadistic in how the film revels in it. What gives Oldboy an artistic dimension is its brutal, Kafkaesque premise of an unjust and inexplicable loss of freedom that’s at the root of Oh’s demented, anger-fueled, violent revenge. As Oh, Oldboy also features an intense performance by the brilliant Korean actor Choi Min-sik, who is best known for his role in Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaeson. But despite the cruel injustice that is at the heart of Oldboy’s narrative, its fast-paced, highly stylized trajectory is very hard to take. At the end of the film—if you manage to make it through—you feel like you’ve been assaulted, put through a wringer, brutalized by the on-screen violence. The plot is complicated, convoluted, and way over the top. And yes, this melodrama feeds the artificial, comic-strip nature of the film’s premise, but what is this all about, and what is it for? Perhaps the most twisted bit of Oldboy belongs not to the movie’s makers, but to its distributor. In Chicago and elsewhere in the United States, the film is playing mostly in an English-dubbed version, with only one Korean-language, English-subtitled screening each day. This is undoubtedly in anticipation to a demographic analysis of the film’s potential audience. The audience which likes action films would not accept subtitles—obviously this audience skews young. But Oldboy is not a film for teenagers. I don’t know what pleasure, no matter how well executed, anyone could get from watching it. For me, movies still are about the pleasure of watching. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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