Park Chan-wook is a director of hyper-stylized, hyper-violent films that sit uneasily, at least as far as some uncomfortable critics are concerned, between exploitation movie and high cinematic art.
His The Vengeance Trilogy (복수 삼부작) : Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005) is regarded as a Korean counterpart to the work of Quentin Tarantino.
Mr. Vengeance earned respectful notices from critics. Its hero is a deaf-mute living with his sister in a run-down tenement. She needs a kidney transplant and he is ready to take radical steps to ensure she gets one - namely to kidnap the daughter of his former boss. In doing so, he unleashes the furies. It's partly by accident that Park ended up making three vengeance movies on the trot. "I dislike repetition of similar films," he insists. Nonetheless, when the chance came to make Old Boy, he jumped. The film was based on a manga by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi but Park says it was also heavily influenced by his love of Franz Kafka.
Ask Park how his unlikely background as a philosophy student at Sogang University influences his approach to filmmaking and he suggests that it's the thorough way in which philosophers tackle their subject. "They go so deep that they can't go any further." In his trilogy, he has explored vengeance in equally exhaustive fashion. (1)
OLDBOY (Oldeuboi)
PLOTLINE
Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is a husband and father whose reputation for womanizing is well known. One day, for reasons he doesn't understand, Oh Dae-su finds himself locked up in a prison cell, with no idea of what his crime was or whom his jailers may be. With a small television as his only link to the outside world and a daily ration of fried dumplings as his only sustenance, Oh Dae-su struggles to keep his mind and body intact, but when he learns through a news report that his wife has been killed, he begins a long and difficult project of digging an escape tunnel with a pair of chopsticks. Before he can finish -- and after 15 years behind bars -- Oh Dae-su is released, with as little explanation as when he was locked up, and he's soon given a wad of money and a cellular phone by a bum on the street. Emotionally stunted but physically strong after 15 years in jail, Oh Dae-su struggles to unravel the secret of who is responsible for locking him up, what happened to his wife and daughter, and how to best get revenge against his captors. (2)
ANALYSIS
Beginning with an unsympathetic scene in a police station, where Oh Dae-su has been arrested on his daughter's birthday for being publicly drunk.
He gets bailed out by his friend, however, as his friend is calling from a phone booth to Oh Dae-su's home to explain that he's been found, Oh Dae-su disappears.
"If you stand aimlessly at a phone booth on a rainy day, and meet a man whose face is covered by a violet umbrella, I'd suggest that you get close to the TV."
He wakes up in a hotel room complete with shower, bed, and television, the space fortified with a metal door and brick walls. He cannot leave. Daily meals of fried dumplings are given through a passage in the door. Periodically an electronic jingle announces the release of sleeping gas, and when Oh regains consciousness, his room has been cleaned and his hair groomed.That cycle continues for days, months, years, without him ever knowing who has done this to him or why. Television breaks the news of his wife and child dying in an accident; now he is all alone. Action programs provide physical training. He punches the brick walls to pass the time, developing callus-enforced knuckles. Plagued by bizarre dreams, or maybe hallucinations, he may be under the spell of hypnosis. Time is spent journaling long lists of potential enemies, and by the stack of notebooks, Oh Dae-su has not led a distinguished life. “Even though I’m no more than a monster,” he asks, “don’t I, too, have the right to live?” The specifics of how he escapes are unimportant, since he is set free and made to think he escaped. He is unleashed on the world in a hardened and empty form, and his only purpose is revenge. Hungry for life, Oh Dae-su meets sushi chef Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong). She serves him the live octopus as a delicacy, but not before he receives a call from his former captor. “Do you know who has done this to you?” the voice asks. Oh Dae-su guesses a few names from his notebooks, all wrong. The voice discloses, “I’m a sort of scholar. And my major is you.” (3)
Oh Dae-su has been locked up for 15 years without once seeing another living person. For him the close presence of anyone is like a blow to all of his senses. When he says in a restaurant, "I want to eat something that is alive," we understand (a) that living seafood is indeed consumed as a delicacy in Asia, and (b) he wants to eat the life, not the food, because he has been buried in death for 15 years. (4)
Mi-do allows Dae-su into her home following his fainting at the restaurant. Right off the bat, one realises that Mi-do is broken, too. She is broken in different places than Dae-su, but nonetheless, they find common ground in the damage done to each other.
In between searching for the location of his prison, and wondering about things long-lost, Dae-su and Mi-do have formed a strange sort of affinity for one another. Like a couple of broken toys, discarded now that their place in society is no longer valid, they lie in a strange corner of society’s room.
The key, of course, is Mi-do. Why her? Why does the narative of Oldboy seem to destine them to pair together?
The answer is the penultimate assault of the film. It’s a revelation delivered only after Dae-su has uncovered the dark truth to “why”.
Mr Evergreen, our villain, is the narrativium. He always has been. Every action since the night Dae-su was whisked off from the street has been carefully planned and pre-destined. Dae-su is naught but a puppet in a game that he cannot alter. Right up until the end, his actions are all the product of Evergreen’s mind.
Society did not discard Dae-su and Mi-do. Evergreen broke them himself, and then watched as they faded from society’s memory – and waited. (5)
The movie apparently pits two different sorts of vengeance against one another. One is vengeance driven by past wrongs: a slow, smouldering vengeance, plotted down to perfection over years, and executed over years. The second is vengeance of a more explosive nature, a violent, animal reaction to harm done in the face of zero rationale for the harm. (5)
The question it presents us with? It’s almost the same from the first moments of the movie, delivered by a man on the brink of death, only this time, by Dae-su:
Even though I’m no more than a monster – don’t I, too, have the right to live?
And the lesson it leaves us with?
''Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.''
When the credits roll, our feelings about Oh Dae-su’s decision are confused and traumatized into numbness, until, of course, we provide an answer for ourselves. Left with our uncertainties, Park allows the viewer to pass their own judgment. Does Oh Dae-su’s crooked smile in the last shot reflect a part of him not affected by the hypnosis? Or perhaps he is finally happy, blissfully unaware of the wrongness of his love for Mi-do, which has its own depraved implications. There’s no doubt that any answer comes with its own ugly spin, leaving the viewer in an uncomfortable position no matter what their outcome. (5)
FIGHT SCENE
The film's grisliest, most jaw-droppingly memorable scene is the famous fight scene where Oh Dae-su rips through a hallway of bad guys, armed only with a claw hammer, filmed in a three-plus-minute one shot.
This is probably one of the best fight scenes in cinematic history.
(1)Park life, The Guardian
(2)All Movie, synopsis by Mark Deming
(3)Essay by Brian Eggert March 23, 2009
(4)Oldboy, Roger Ebert
(5)thecorvidreview, an analysis by the Crow
