[film analysis] Oldboy (2003) and South Korea in late 90s to early 2000s
Director: Park Chan-wook
Screenwriters: Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Jun-hyung, Park Chan-wook
Stars: Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jung
Cinematographer: Chung Chung-hoon
Grand Prix winner at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival — “Oldboy” (2003) was made by the hands of international famous director Park Chan-wook. The film was an adaptation of a Japanese manga with a similar title written by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya. It is the second film of Park Chan-wook unofficial series The Vengeance Trilogy including “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002), “Oldboy” (2003) and “Lady Vengeance” (2005). In 2013, a Hollywood version of “Oldboy” was directed by Spike Lee.
The film begins with Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), a drunken man, is arrested at a police station. His friend arrives and helps him out. While the friend is calling to his home, Dae-su surprisingly disappears into thin air. He wakes up in a hotel room with basic set of furniture. He doesn’t know who captures him and why. He is eventually fed and received haircut, clean clothes and room services while being fainted by gas. This routine is going on for 15 years. After being released, Dae-su becomes a revenge machine. He meets Mi-do, a chef at a sushi restaurant, on his manner to discover the one who captures him. She takes him home after Dae-su suddenly faints while receiving a phone call. Later, Dae-su and Mi-do find out Lee Woo-jin is the captor and Lee reveals his shocking plan at the end.
“Oldboy” has become a worldwide phenomenon. The film grossed nearly $14,980,005 internationally and has become the fifth highest-grossing film of 2003 in South Korea. In the United States, “Oldboy” was released two years later and grossed $707,481. Besides its commercial success, Park’s masterpiece also receives many positive reviews from Hollywood critics. The film is considered a suspense thriller with a mixed genre that combines neo-noir and dark comedy with a revenge theme. Roger Ebert (2005) comments on the film’s genre and theme “In its sexuality and violence, this is the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States; 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.” Park’s work also starts a whole fresh boundary of exotic horror according to Peter Bradshaw (2004) from The Guardians. Although the film has a creative mixture of genres and an intriguingly complex story, the reason for the success of “Oldboy” is the directing which can harmonize the grotesque and oddness of all elements. As Derek Elley (2004) from Variety mentions in his critic review, “Though all the pieces of the complex plot do fall into place — if not without a lot of expository dialogue — the movie relies increasingly on sheer directorial smarts rather than an emotionally engrossing storyline.” Park Chan-wook’s directing style has even been compared to Quentin Tarantino, a famous director in Hollywood, by Eric Snider (2005).
The excellence of this Korean classic was an inspiration for Spike Lee, a Hollywood director, to remake an American version in 2013. Spike Lee is a well-known and talented director in Hollywood. Despite his competence, Lee’s independence characteristic was a misgiving in handling all the quintessence of Park’s work (Alex Suskind, 2013). The American reinterpretation, as Lee’s consideration in an interview with Sheila Robert in Collider, has a similar story structure to the original. However, the journey of Joe Doucett, starring Josh Brolin, is different in details. Alex Suskind mentions in Vulture “While the journey he takes along the way has its own unique twists and turns, the overall structure doesn’t deviate from the original source. There is still a list of enemies, the use of poison gas, a greasy dumpling scavenger hunt, and the help of a young female acquaintance.” Since Lee calls his film is a reinterpretation instead of a remake, he manages to deliver his own spirit into it while inserting hints and signs as tributes for the original masterpiece such as an octopus in a fish tank or a street vendor wearing angel wings (Alex Suskind, 2013).
Although Park Chan-wook has presumably denied that he intentionally inserted political messages in an interview (Neil Young, 2004), audience is still able to interpret the film’s context in terms of political, social and economic aspects. As in political and economic subtext, Oh Dae-su is captured in a room with a television which broadcasting many news of South Korea and the world during the imprisonment. Apparently, in fifteen years from 1987 to 2003, the recent history of South Korea is presented by the news program on the television. It begins with former president Chun Doo-hwan’s jailing for crime of corruption. Then, there are some proudest moments of South Korea such as the end of Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, the Inter-Korea Summit in 2000 and the Japan-Korea World Cup in 2002. Kim (2010, p. 44) argues that these events reflect the hope of Dae-su since they are shown in split-screen along with the image of Dae-su digging through the wall to escape. However, despite most events that announced are positive and hopeful news, the event that has the longest showtime is the collapse of Seongsu Bridge in 1994. Nancy Abelmann, an anthropologist of Korea, selects “collapse” as a keyword for South Korea in the 1990’s since many incidents occurred and brought losses in terms of human and property and they climaxed with the economic crisis in 1997. Nevertheless, Koreans acknowledged it was a reasonable result of the country’s “rapid-fire economic development”. During the time of captivity, five presidents were elected with people’s hope in democratization and finished their terms in shame because of corruption. Dae-su is surprisingly released a day right after he predicts he could escape within a month due to his digging progress. The question why he was imprisoned for fifteen years refers to the hopes of 1988 followed by fifteen years of South Korea’s disappointment.
The rapid transformation of South Korea during Dae-su’s imprisonment, as many scholars argue, along with the violence of the film is the critique of the inequality of the society in South Korea due to its economic crisis (Kirk, 2016). The IMF features were dealt by the nation strikingly in 1997. It reconstructed the economic so that large economic gains were seen by international export-oriented corporations. However, the wealth did not trickle down and not enough new employments were generated by the economy. The result is the inequality of income and middle-class hollowing. This gap of social class is signified by many images in “Oldboy”. Woo-jin represents the upper-class who wears fancy suits and has many advantages in terms of finance and background. He is living in an odd design apartment, owning a hypnotist and having enough money to make other people sacrifice their hands. After releasing Dae-su, Woo-jin always has the upper-hand in his plan and uses his financial strength to guarantee the plan succeeds. In contrary, Dae-su first appears as a drunken man at a police station with his floppy businesswear. Although the sequence is shot in only two locations (the police station and the telephone booth), audience readily perceive his unhappy life. The alcoholism is presented as a critique for Korea’s corporate culture (Onishi). In the film, Dae-su once makes a joke of his name by using each syllable as a beginning of a word and it turns out “Let’s just get through today” in Korean. When he is released, Dae-su happens to be in a “wider prison” as Woo-jin has asked for several times. This foreshadows the fact that he is still in Woo-jin’s masterplan which refers to the middle-class when they have to live in a society controlled by the wealthy. Kim (2010) concludes on the film’s social context “…the upper class not only have an almost immeasurable amount of wealth (and time) they are beyond the law (as evidenced by the lack of state presence), have the ability to manipulate the middle/working class, and cannot be overthrown, even when someone who is inclined to do so gains the means.”
The second installment of the Vengeance Trilogy standouts because its style meets the audience’s taste while still delivers all the director’s intentions and talent. The style of “Oldboy” consists of the brilliant story telling through vengeance theme and mixed-thriller genre, Hollywood suspense techniques and bold character development of Park since he decides to approach naturalism which makes his hero (Oh Dae-su) imperfect and hateful (Kaklamanidou, 2007). All the components are applied in order to convey a more profound message of human natures of people who are living in a capitalist society of South Korea.
Nguyen Hoang Bao
Reference list:
Bradshaw, P 2004, Oldboy review — opens up a whole new sicko frontier of exotic horror, the Guardian, <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/oct/15/2>
Ebert, R 2005, Oldboy Movie Review & Film Summary (2005), Rogerebert.com,<https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2005>
Elley, D 2004, Old Boy, Variety, <https://variety.com/2004/film/markets-festivals/old-boy-1200537146/>
Kaklamanidou, B 2007, Genre: Oldboy and the Suspense Thriller, Offscreen.com, <https://offscreen.com/view/genre_oldboy>
Kim, S 2010, ‘A Sociohistorical Contextual Analysis of the Use of Violence in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy’, Master thesis, College of Fine Arts of Ohio University, Ohio, <https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1258132362&disposition=inline>
Kirk, M 2016, Seoul’s Inequality as Violence in ‘Oldboy’, CityLab, <https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/10/seouls-inequality-as-violence-in-oldboy/505007/>
Roberts, S 2013, Spike Lee Talks OLDBOY, Why He Considers the Film a Reinterpretation, Performances of Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen & His Confidence in Audience Turnout, Collider, <http://collider.com/spike-lee-oldboy-interview/>
Snider, E 2005, Oldboy (Korean) — EricDSnider.com, EricDSnider.com, <https://www.ericdsnider.com/movies/oldboy/>
Suskind, A 2013, The Differences Between Spike Lee’s Oldboy and the Original Oldboy, Vulture, <https://www.vulture.com/2013/11/what-did-spike-lees-oldboy-remake-change.html>
Young, N 2004, Neil Young’s Film Lounge — Park Life, Jigsawlounge.co.uk, <https://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews/neil-youngs-film-lounge-park-life/>
