Oldboy (2003)

Park Chan-wook

Korea

120 min, color, Korean (English subtitles)

My faith in professional critics, never much above the flatline, has now irrevocably dipped into the distant negative numbers. A random scan of the reviews of Oldboy shows me that (a) most of these people are infantile in their thinking, (b) they would not know a piece of art even if it came and painted sunflowers on their asses, and (c) they are so isolated in their imaginary towers of snobbery and elitism that they would gladly consider dreck to be sublime. This is in many ways a continuation of high-flying stupidity by other means: The less comprehensible something is to the average viewer, the more important it must be. The problem is that this way of thinking as about as deep as believing that the cookie-cutter words of "wisdom" that underlie the film ("Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone") can be elevated to anything more profound a love-struck teenager would write in a journal.

The film was not bad. In fact, it was fairly good. But it was not a masterpiece, it was not even of the sort that would merit repeat viewings. Aside from inspired editing, camera work, and some clever funny scenes, it is such a mess that one must wonder if the aforementioned critics have actually seen the film at all. I have to summarize the story to make my single point, so here goes the obligatory

SPOILER ALERT

Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is a married man in his thirties. He has a daughter and although he loves her very much, he's also given to afterwork drinking which gets him into trouble on account of his explosive temper. On the night of his daughter's third birthday, he ends up at a police station for getting into a brawl with a man who could not stand Dae-su flirting with his girlfriend. Dae-su's childhood friend, Joo-hwan (Ji Dae-han) comes to bail him out but right outside the station Dae-su suddenly vanishes without a trace.

It turns out that he has been abducted by unknown people for an unknown reason. He is locked in a studio without an explanation, and he is left there for fifteen years. Yes, that's right, fifteen years (this will be important). Dae-su not only loses the pigmentation of his skin for lack of sunlight but seems to lose his sanity as well for lack of human contact. He watches TV, he writes a journal, but he is periodically drugged, hypnotized, and, more importantly, he is never told why he is being held. At this point I thought that we have a modern reworking of Kafka's The Trial. Boy, was I wrong!

Dae-su's spends years digging what could not have been more than a foot-long tunnel in the wall (in the end he manages to stick out his hand through it) but just as he is about to escape, he is suddenly and inexplicably released on the roof of a building. There he meets a suicidal man who tells him the other piece of "wisdom" in the film: "Even though I am no better than a beast, don't I have the right to live?" (To which the immediate and obvious answer is "It depends... what have you done?" Unfortunately, that's not the question people seem to ask a lot in this film.

Naturally, Dae-su would want to find out why he was treated so badly. It's not just that he's lost 15 years of his life. He has been unjustly accused of murdering his wife (apparently killed by the same person who had him imprisoned) and the loss of his daughter who has been sent to live with foster parents in Sweden. As he slowly adapts to his surroundings, he is strangely drawn to do things that he cannot explain. He ends up at a sushi bar where he devours a live octopus---a most disgusting scene that hardly has an excuse even if this thing is a delicacy for some Koreans... some Koreans also eat dogs, but that does not art (edible or not) make. The female sushi chef Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong) instantly falls for this stranger who promptly falls asleep at the counter, forcing her to take him home. All of this is quite unnatural, but at least it is explained later on in the film.

Dae-su's attempts to uncover the mystery of his confinement eventually lead him to the Chinese restaurant that made all those dumplings he was fed over the years. He tracks the delivery boy and locates the prison, which is apparently a facility where people can have their enemies locked up for as long as they want. The second excruciating scene follows: Dae-su ties up the guy that runs the place, and then methodically pulls out his teeth... with a hammer until the bleeding dude divulges the location of tapes with conversations with the client who had hired him to lock up Dae-su. It is never made clear why one would suffer to have his teeth removed without anesthetic instead of just handing over the damn cassette. (I have to admit to liking Dae-su's brutal exit from the premises quite a bit: the camera slowly rolls with him as he battles an endless supply of thugs, the whole setup obviously reminiscent of the old scroller computer games. Very funny indeed.)

Naturally, Dae-su's suspicion turns toward Mi-do, mostly because of her totally inexplicable behavior that involves inviting a total stranger into her house, confessing to liking him, and promising sex in the near future---she's still a virgin (that's important too). Just as he's about to "question" her in his unorthodox ways, his cell phone rings and the unknown assailant informs him that he's right across the street. Dae-su abandons Mi-do (still tied up), and seconds later barges into yet another dilapidated apartment, where he finds the tall, handsome, and quite insane Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae) and his blonde henchman Mr Han (Kim Byeong-ok).

And here we have the first totally inexcusable lapse in the script. Woo-jin cheerfully informs Dae-su that he is behind his imprisonment. Dae-su charges at him with the hammer, a natural reaction, but Woo-jin manages to halt the assault by warning Dae-su that if he kills him now, he will never learn why this all happened to him. When Dae-su hesitates putting the hammer to Woo-jin's temple, the psycho also warns him that if he is tortured, his weak, pacemaker-assisted, heart will likely collapse quickly, burying the secret with him. If that's not enough to deter Dae-su, he also produces a remote which he claims will shut off the pacemaker immediately. That is, he threatens suicide if Dae-su attempts to kill him. That Dae-su would fail to smash his brains at this point is absurd: he has lost fifteen years of his life, his wife has been murdered, and his daughter dispatched to a foreign country... who cares why the guy did it, it's not as if finding out would make him suddenly deserve life! I contend that any normal human being would instantly bash Woo-jin's head right there and then. (Incidentally, had Dae-su actually done so, he would have avoided all the tragic pain that follows.)

But now, he leaves Woo-jin who has also threatened to kill Mi-do unless Dae-su uncovers the mystery within five days (yet another reason to kill him instantly), and rushes back to Mi-do's apartment where he finds the thugs from the full-service prison. They have obviously come to perform some oral surgery on him but an unexpected appearance of a briefcase full of money dissuades them. As they leave, Dae-su shouts at their leader that he will find him and cut off his hand for having touched Mi-do's breasts. The couple then leaves, in an apparent attempt to escape Woo-jin's threat, and they end up at a hotel where she gives up her virginity to him. Unfortunately, the devious Woo-jin has bugged Dae-su's shoe sole and he tracks them there, leaving a most gruesome present to them: the prison guy's severed hand.

Some trials and tribulations later, Dae-su finally uncovers the truth. Back in high school, he saw Woo-jin's sister making out with her own brother. This spicy piece of gossip he divulged to his friend Joo-hwan, who then went on to make it public in the strict Catholic school. The rumor grew until it made the sister pregnant with her brother's baby. The resulting humiliation and abuse eventually unhinged the girl and she committed suicide, leaving her distraught brother to nurse thoughts of sweet revenge: the apparently blamed Dae-su for blabbing his secret, and it never really occurred to him that perhaps having such an unorthodox relationship with one's sister could have had something to do with the tragic outcome.

Dae-su, having finally figured all this out, stashes Mi-do for safe-keeping with the private prison people (reasoning that a guy with a severed hand will not be friends with Woo-jin), and then rushes to exact his own revenge on the incestuous psychopath. It is in Woo-jin's penthouse that he learns the awful truth: Mi-do is his own daughter, and that's why Woo-jin let him out: so he can fuck her and then get himself fucked up. The second grotesquely stupid scene of the film then follows when Woo-jin discloses that Mi-do is about to learn the truth herself. This causes Dae-su to fly into a strange mixture of rage and penance: he grovels before Woo-jin, begging him not to let this happen. He alternates between promising to be his lapdog (complete with licking his shoe) and threatening to eat him piece by piece. Eventually, Dae-su gets so deranged, that he cuts off his tongue, a bloody apology designed to show that he admits to having being guilty of blabbing, that he is sorry for the tragedy his tongue caused, and that he must be forgiven now. Woo-jin relents, and orders that Mi-do is not forced to learn the truth. He then leaves the semi-conscious Dae-su amid the sounds of a recording of his passionate sex with his daughter, gets into the elevator, and blows his brains out.

My contention is that this entire sequence is totally unbelievable. First, it is hard to understand why Dae-su would actually blame himself so much for gossiping (mind you, he wasn't even the one to tell others in the school, it was his friend that did it). And the film does insist that he is to blame, the symbolic tongue-cutting is presented as sincere, rather than a desperate attempt to fool Woo-jin. There is no reason to suspect that Dae-su genuinely regrets his sin. But even leaving this aside, we have to deal with the blatant absurdity of a man who would rather cut off his own tongue than inflict revenge on an enemy who has completely ruined him (recall now my original point that had he done this the first time he had the chance, he would not have slept with his daughter, and it would not have been necessary to lose his tongue). So what if Mi-do learns the truth? It's not like either of them knew about their blood relationship when they had sex. It may be icky and horrible and all that, but it's not something they would not be able to get over if they wanted to.

But this is the real problem with the film: they do not want to get over it. When Dae-su goes to the hypnotist, he has his memory "erased" so he can go back to a blissful love affair with his daughter. And by the way, this whole hypnosis device is so lame, I laughed when they told us about it all earnest. I mean, the main story that underlies the entire plot is told to Dae-su (which is about as awful as it gets: a movie should not have to narrate a story with words), and all the holes in the pathetic script are supposedly plugged with the excuse of well, we hypnotized you both so you could fall in love and do all these things. Oh, please!

I have no problems suspending disbelief and operating in any imaginary world that a director wants to create. But I still want characters in said world to behave according to its rules. The problem with Oldboy is that Dae-su behaves contrary to the rules of the universe in the film, and that's precisely what makes the movie subpar. We are supposed to think about his quest for revenge, but what is this supposedly destructive quest when Dae-su shies away from fulfilling its purpose on at least two occasions? And I do not buy that this failure can be explained away by his "need to know."

As a previously normal human being, Dae-su certainly has had his share of less than stellar episodes, but he must have known full well that nothing in his past could have motivated a sane human being to inflict these fifteen years of misery on him. In other words, he is basically looking for an explanation from a psychopath. But what is this sort of "explanation" worth it? Will his actions become more intelligible to a normal person? I doubt that: we may pity psychopaths, we may stick them behind locked doors to peep at them through tiny holes, but we do not understand them. As someone famous said, to understand is to forgive. But there can be no forgiveness here because the motivation comes from a sick mind. That's why this cat deserved to be killed by its curiosity: Dae-su's motivation is baseless.

And the sick ending is revolting. The man that cut off his tongue so that his daughter would not learn about their incest arranges to spend the rest of his life with her. Not only does he succumb to the perverse passions that have caused the tragedy in the Catholic high school of his past, but he has learned nothing from the experience. I am guessing that the film is trying to tell us that one cannot master these passions, that one is helpless even when fully aware of their devastating results, that Dae-su, painfully aware of his sins, cannot help but get twisted enough to surrender to his carnal love. All that may be so, and perhaps on a more forgiving day I could swallow that particular bit of nonsense, but what I really cannot stand is that he makes a fool out of his daughter/lover by denying her the truth. The truth may be painful, it may even destroy her, but he has no right to make such a decision for her. So he sucks as a human being overall.

I will give the film 5/10, only because I liked the editing and Choi Min-suk's hair.

November 23, 2005