#oldboy2003

MPAA Rating: R/ Genre: Mystery-Drama/ Stars: Choi Min-Sik, Yoo Ji-Tae, Gang Hye-Jung, Chi Dae-Han, Oh Dal-Su, Lee Seung-Shin, Kim Byoung-Ok/ Runtime: 120 minutes

A man gets violently drunk and is chained to the wall in a police station while his friend comes and bails him out, but while the friend is making a telephone call, the man disappears from an empty city street in the middle of the night only to later on regain consciousness in what looks like a shabby hotel room with nothing more than a bed, a desk, a TV, a bathroom cubicle and there is also a steel door with a slot near the floor for his food tray and occasionally a little tune plays, the room fills with gas, and when he regains consciousness the room has been cleaned, his clothes have been changed, and he has received a haircut. This routine continues for 15 years during which he is never told who has imprisoned him, or why and all the while he watches TV until it becomes his world, he fills one journal after another with his writings, he pounds the wall until his fists grow bloody, and then hardened, he screams, and then he tragically learns from TV that his blood and fingerprints were found at the scene of his wife's murder and that not only has their daughter been adopted in Sweden, but that if he were to escape, he would be a wanted man but when he is unexpectedly freed he suddenly finds he has only 5 days to not only find out why, but to get revenge as well.

This is the story of "Oldboy" a movie by Park Chanwook that is rather unique in how it asks us to watch the main character objectively, asking no sympathy, and stand outside his plight to such an extreme that we find ourselves void of any emotions when he does talk with the man who had imprisoned him later in the movie and he asks him why he has done all that he has to him and the man simply says: "I'm sort of a scholar, and what I study is you." Indeed in terms of its sexuality and violence, this is the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States as the standards of a puritanical minority, imposed on broadcasting and threatened even for cable, make studios unwilling to produce films that might face uncertain distribution, but content does not make a movie good or bad as content at the end of the day is merely what a film is about and "Oldboy" is a powerful film not because of what it’s content depicts, but because it’s content focuses powerfully of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare. Now the man that is our hero is named Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-Sik) and he with all honesty is an absolute wretch when we first meet him, a drunk who has missed his little daughter's birthday and now sits forlornly in the police station, ridiculously wearing the angel's wings he bought her as a present and while he is really truly not a bad man years of alcohol abuse have rendered him useless, but when he suddenly finds himself freed from his bizarre captivity 15 years later, he is a different person, intensely focused on revenge, and ridiculously responsive to kindness and upon wandering into a restaurant, he meets a young woman who, he knows from the TV, is Korea's "Chef of the Year" and who we soon learn is named Mido (Gang Hye-Jung) and Mido, sensing that Dae-su has suffered, and feeling an instinctive sympathy, decides to take him home with her, hear his story, care for him, and eventually come to love him. Meanwhile, he sets out on a methodical search to find the secret of his captivity which takes the form of the knowledge that he was fed pot stickers, day after day, until their taste was burned into his memory, and with that memory as his guide he travels the city's restaurants until he finds the one that supplied his meals and with that info uses it as the key to tracking down his captors.

This is also incidentally, and really if one would like me to be honest, just the beginning for this movie, and also incidentally the point at which the film stops being a mystery and starts to become a tragedy in the classical sense and while I will not reveal the several secrets that lie ahead for Oh what I will say is that they brilliantly come not as shabby plot devices, but rather as one turn after another of the screws of mental and physical anguish and poetic justice with special kudos going to a virtuoso sequence in which Oh fights, and beats the living shit out of, a large gang of people who work for his former imprisoner, and one can see that his rage is so great that he is scarcely slowed by the knife sticking in his back that was left by one of his attackers. Indeed this truly is a man consumed by the need for revenge, and who eventually discovers he was imprisoned by another man whose need was no less consuming albeit infinitely more diabolical.

Now I am not an expert on the Korean cinema, which is considered in most if not all critical circles as one of the most creative in the world, but I can honestly say that of the Korean films I've seen I’ve yet to find one that did not contain some form of extraordinary sadomasochism and Oldboy is no different as the film contains a tooth-pulling scene that truly makes Laurence Olivier's Nazi dentist in "Marathon Man" look like a healer and for you animal lovers out there there is a scene during which an octopus is definitely harmed during the making of the movie. To be fair though these scenes do not play for shock value, but rather are part of the whole and in the case of the octopus scene Oh has been locked up for 15 years without once seeing another living person or thing really and for him the close presence of anything alive is like a blow to all of his senses so when he says in a restaurant, "I want to eat something that is alive," and they bring him the octopus it’s not because he’s a fucked up person who enjoys taking pleasure out of killing animals, but because (a) living seafood is indeed consumed as a delicacy in Asia, and (b) he wants to eat the life of the animal, not the animal itself, because he feels like he has been buried in death for 15 years and he wants to get some life back in him and we not only come to understand that, but sympathize with him as well. Now some of you may be asking why would Mido, young, pretty and talented, take this wretched man into her life? Honestly if I could guess a reason perhaps it is because he is so manifestly helpless, perhaps because she believes his story, and even the reason why he cannot reclaim his real name or identity or perhaps because in that 15 years Oh has been transformed into a man she senses is strong and good, when he was once weak and despicable and from his point of view, love is joined with salvation, acceptance, forgiveness and even greater the possibility of redemption as well and all of this is in place during the several scenes of revelation which follow thus providing them with context and giving them a deeper meaning as well and while yes the ending is improbable in its complexity it is, to it’s credit, not impossible, and above all it is not unmotivated either.