Stars: Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jung, Ji Dae-han
Director: Park Chan-wook
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
This is also my first encounter with Park Chan-wook, and one of my first with Korean cinema. With Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, and Bong Joon-ho, amongst others, Korean cinema has become one of the great centers of artistic interest in the past 15 years. As I'm suspecting we'll discuss at my next class (tonight was just a screening), it's been one of the great centers of artistic growth and expression in the world of cinema. The crowning achievement of the movement, according to fanboys and many critics everywhere, is Oldboy.
(Spoilers and how ahead) Before I get into the rest of the film, I will say that I had one great misfortune with my screening of the movie: instead of getting the original actors and their voices, I was forced to sit through dubbing of the film instead. I've researched a bit, and it seems the American version of this DVD may not have the option to see the film with subtitles and the Korean voices, and that's a damn shame because it's next to impossible to judge the performances onscreen properly without hearing the actual voices.
The film unfolds in a manner that likely isn't familiar to a lot of cinematic viewers if they spend most of their time in summer blockbusters and Inception is the most avant garde you get with your cinematic tastes (this may be a snooty article-not quite sure where I'm going with it yet), but for anyone who frequents the art house, it was relatively easy to follow. Oh Dae-su (Min-sik), a businessman, is kidnapped and taken hostage for fifteen years for a reason we don't understand by a man we haven't been introduced to yet. After fifteen years in captivity, he is freed, and of course vows revenge against the man who imprisoned him. Along the way, he meets a young woman named Mi-do (Hye-jung) whom he feels a strong physical connection with, a feeling she reciprocates.
We watch as Oh Dae-su cavorts around what appears to be Seoul, slowly learning that his daughter has been adopted by a Swedish couple and that a man by the name of Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae) was the one who took him prisoner. He plays to Oh Dae-su's hunger for knowledge and justification of what had happened to him, and Oh Dae-su goes out on a fact-finding mission, all the while falling in love with Mi-do.
This is where the plot takes a bit of a left turn (after enough dentistry torture to make Dr. Szell wince), and we learn that the terrible secret in Oh Dae-su's past that got him locked up was that he learned that Woo-jin had committed incest with his sister, and had spread this rumor around the school. This caused Woo-jin's sister to commit suicide after experiencing a false pregnancy. And of course, because we've already gone down that rabbit hole, we learn that Oh Dae-su's daughter wasn't really adopted, but instead is in fact his lover Mi-do. In the film's final moments, we see a showdown where no one truly wins, and we're left with anguish and horrified reactions from everyone.
There is certainly artistry on display in this movie. The cinematography is crisp, clean, and the story works well on paper, even if I found it very easily anticipated for a thriller (you saw every twist coming a mile away). This is a director that I would seek out in the future, and will probably try one of his other less storied films at some point.
But for now, I have to admit that I was grossly underwhelmed. The film plays like a Quentin Tarantino wet dream, and I mean that in the worst way possible. Every opportunity to be disgusting and violent and get the audience to cringe is taken, typically to no point to the plot (seriously, what was with all of the dentist torture?). I found the film's plot to be so tiresome, and a stronger editor would have made a lot better sense out of that ending, which just kept going and going and going.
The worst part, of course, was the dubbing. The woman who voiced Mi-do had such a high-pitched, squeaky voice that you could never remotely take her seriously, certainly not as a lover of Oh Dae-su (considering she looked and sounded a third his age, that story was supremely creepy way before they introduced the incest angle). Overall, though, none of the actors really excited me, and Yoo Ji-tae is so much younger than Choi Min-sik that it wasn't remotely believable that they were the same age, making their story that much more confusing and muddled (Min-sik is fourteen years older than Ji-tae in real life).
Those are my thoughts on this very famous film-what are yours? Did you also find it wildly overrated and far too indulgent? Or are you thinking that I've been taking some crazy pills? Share in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment