posted by Scene -- @ 11:55 AM

Chanwook Park's "Oldboy"

Check out my piece on Oldboy at Halfwaymag.com

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I’ve tried to write this review of Chanwook Park’s Oldboy several times already. (You can ask my editor about how long it took me to finally hand this in.) But no matter what I talk about I can’t seem to get at the core of the movie’s appeal. I can’t seem to say exactly what I want to say.

As an experience, Oldboy gets deep into your gut and wrenches. Much hoopla has been made over the third act’s careening turn into incest and suicide, mutilation and humiliation. And as a film, Oldboy crisps over like bacon with sharp compositions, both static and fluid. But there is something else happening deep within the film, something that goes far beyond declarations of shock, schlock, or pure visceral imagery. It’s elusive and perhaps unintentional, but I couldn’t complete a review without acknowledging its existence.

It’s difficult to put my finger on it, but there is a dialectical debate at play within the film. At one point our villain, Lee Woo-Jin (Yoo Hi-Tae), asks our protagonist, Oh Daesu (Choi Min-sik), “Do you seek revenge, or do you find the truth?” At another point Oh Daesu muses to himself, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.” The film posits truth as something horrifying and alienating, and demonstrates this within its own disturbing final scenes. But there is an escape: the shallow pleasures of the revenge film, the comforts of laughter. It’s almost as if Oldboy outright tells you that if you can’t handle its truths then just enjoy the movie as another hipster-friendly gore-fest. Watch through the ironic eyes of a Tarantino, rather than the pained gaze of our own Oh Daesu.

And so what do you do? Do you settle for the shallower pleasures of laughter and of the bloody revenge sequences? Or do you dare go deeper and risk all that “deeper” entails? It’s of note that the film’s most talked about scene is when Oh Daesu fends off an army of henchmen with a hammer in his hand and a knife in his back. For, sublime and impressive as the sequence is, it isn’t entirely successful. Many of the punches and kicks miss their mark and thus recall fight choreography from professional wrestling. The un-pivoting side-scroll, though seeming fresh, is merely theatrical, a regression in cinematic imagination. And really, the sequence has nothing to do with any of the film’s major developments.

The real star sequences of Oldboy are the ones nobody wants to talk about: the incest and humiliation scenes. It takes a lot of gut power to declare the love scene between Oh Daesu and his daughter Mi-do (Kang Jye-jeong) “beautiful”, and yet it is. It’s a hungry, passionate scene, with Oh Daesu gorging on Mi-do much as he did a live squid earlier in the film. It might seem baffling that attractive young Mi-do would ever be attracted to this dishevelled crazy man, half ranting lunatic, half Fear Factor contestant, but the film by this point has established Oh Daesu’s desperate need for human contact so thoroughly that we’re there with him. As a love story, theirs may not make sense but we allow it because we want it as well.

When Woo-Jin’s motivations and machinations come to light, the entire love story is recalled and shoved down our throats. We want to barf and it’s so easy to step back and reduce our reactions to “Ewwww, gross.” Gross it is, but Oldboy’s sincerity relents. It’s at this point where Oh Daesu’s love for Mi-do intensifies and in fact becomes more honest in the face of Woo-Jin’s duplicity. He falls truly in love with Mi-do the moment he finds out he is her father. He cries out, crawls on the floor in frustration and begs for her to be spared the unbearable weight of truth. This, the film’s second great scene, focuses on Oh Daesu’s face as it twists from emotion to emotion, leaping manic extremes, and it’s almost too much to bear. He can’t take it either and he cuts his tongue off, unable to scream, unable to spill anymore of these damaging truths. No more honesty, just blood, blood, and more blood. “Cooooool.”

Woo-Jin has his own incestuous affair, except with his sister (and unlike Oh Daesu and Mi-do, in full knowledge of his familial relation to his lover). Their scene is sweetly nostalgic, with diffuse images and bright clothing. He chases his sister with a camera, photographing her more and more provocatively with each snap of the shutter. When he removes her clothing and they begin their tepid interactions, it’s important to note that this is not a rape scene. It is not filmed in any way different than any other clumsy, teenage sex scene. If anything, it is tenderer, devoid of ugly lusting and brimming with awkward, curious love.

All this isn’t to say Oldboy should be read ultimately as a love story. Neither is it to say that the film condones or validates incestuous love. No, Oldboy is a violent revenge tale, no doubt, but yes, it is also more than that.

There is a recurring motif on Oldboy’s soundtrack where a song starts and ends abruptly. It’s clever, given that songs, more than books or movies, carry with them the expectation of a clean finish. Caught up in the momentum of a melody, we expect an ending, or at least an inconspicuous fade away to silence or another song. But nothing in Oldboy, least of all the soundtrack songs—ends cleanly or as expected. At any moment things crash around you, cut, torn, smashed, and served back to you for you to swallow. A shocking movie if ever there was one, Oldboy uses everything, from minute details on the soundtrack to colossal shifts in narrative trajectory, in order to shake you to your core.

But like with Oh Daesu’s tribulations, it’s not what or who, it’s why that’s important. Why is this film so great, so affecting? I can’t say exactly, but I’ll say this: When Justin Lin remakes Oldboy in Hollywood there will be something vital missing. And it won’t be violence, shock, or well-composed visuals.

Jef.Catapang