Oldboy

Consider revenge for a minute. Few ideas have been more used, and abused by novelists, writers and film-makers. There's something about the bad guy getting what he deserves, about the idea that no matter how heinous the crime, retribution can be found. Revenge is great when creating dramas and action flicks, but it's even better when creating tragedies. Oldboy is such a tragedy, and one of the best movies ever made about revenge and its consequences.

The plot is deceivingly  simple, and for a reason. One will reasonably expect certain elements to be present in such a story, so director Park Chan-wook can play with our expectations. Smash them. Rebuild them, only to burn them down again. Oldboy starts out strong and is relentless, here's a movie that deserves the thriller adjective, but is so much more.

Oldboy is about Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik),a man who's kidnapped on a rainy evening after an altercation with the police. He's kept in imprisonment for fifteen years, with no apparent reason. Of course, after being released, one thing is on his mind, and one thing alone: revenge. From here, the plot meanders, from memorable scene to memorable scene, from revelation to revelation, to the ending (and what an ending). I'll avoid all spoilers, but the final third will find all viewers with their mouths agape, for varying reasons.
Park Chan-wook has created some instantly classical scenes for Oldboy (one fight scene steals the show, you'll know it when you see it), but they're part of a greater whole: no frame is gratuitous, all work on a level, and all have a distinct style. It's obvious why Tarantino praised Oldboy so much after seeing it at Cannes (where it won the Grand Prix): it's violent, stylized, with sharp dialogue  and numerous references to the classics (Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Shakespeare, Tarantino himself).

Oldboy is brilliantly acted: watched without subtitles, and not knowing anything about the plot, it's reasonable to expect a fairly intelligent viewer will catch on, and invest in the characters. Choi Min-sik is nothing short of fantastic in playing every human emotion in two hours. Watch his expression as it changes from scene to scene, it's obvious it's been a painstaking role to prepare, and a risk to take on. He deserves as much applause as the director, if not more so.  Kang Hye-jeong plays Mi-do, a sushi chef and the necessary female element for any good tragedy. Pay close attention to the moment in which Oh Dae-su meets Mi-do for the first time. It's a scene that generated a fair amount of controversy, but for all the wrong reasons. You'll want to rewind it after you see the movie, trust me.

To say more is to spoil, so I'll leave the plot at that. Director Park Chan-wook employs some fascinating camera angles and visual twists, making this a beautiful movie just to look at. Which is not to say that it's all style and no substance. One could write books about the themes and motifs in Oldboy. Which is not to say it's pretentious, like foreign cinema usually is.  It's simply a  bloody, deadly and remorseless movie.
 Oh Dae-su's story is more than simple catharsis, bordering on the tooth-grinding and heart-wrenching. Nit-pickers will surely find flaws in Oldboy. Some might even be right, but they are irrelevant.  Here's a movie that could have not existed in any other circumstances, that makes no excuses for itself. If you take one chance with oriental cinema, this should be it.

Consider revenge again after watching Oldboy. It's not the same,is it? Perhaps here lies Oldboy's true triumph: in trying to create a movie about revenge, Park Chan-wook does so much more. Oldboy is timeless and ravishing. Just as  Oh Dae-su's quest for revenge changes everything around him, and everything inside him, so does Oldboy for the viewer: after seeing this one, the very notion of revenge will never be the same again.

10/10 Stefan