Oldboy

 

Park Chan Wook, who turns sixty next Wednesday, directed at least two movies in the nineties. He’d prefer you forget about those. In 2000 he made a thriller called Joint Security Area, which might still hold the record with the highest domestic gross in Korean history, and his real career was launched. His next three features are known as the Vengeance Trilogy. The stories are unrelated, but their themes tie them together. The second of them was a movie called Oldboy, celebrating its 20^th anniversary with an August 16^th, 2023 rerelease. It was the movie that gave him auteur status. He has made a number of acclaimed films since, including last year’s Decision To Leave, but when they write his obituary, Oldboy will be mentioned in the lede.

 

We meet Oh Daesu (Choi Man Sik) in a police station, an outrageously drunk and obnoxious salaryman, chubby, non-descript, noisy. His friend Joo Hwan (Ji Daehan) arrives to bail him out. Outside in the rain, they use a phone booth so Daesu can call home. He has missed his daughter’s fourth birthday. Joo Hwan steps into the booth to talk to Daesu’s wife, and when he turns around, his friend has gone. The arrest is a red herring, and has nothing to do with the movie which follows. Nor does the man we meet much like the man we will come to know. That he is transformed is unsurprising, considering.

Daesu has been kidnapped and imprisoned. His cell resembles a hotel room, one with a pet door at the bottom of the human door. Through it come his food trays. Other than the guard’s feet, he sees nothing of his captors, and he has no idea why he has been imprisoned. His only source of information is a television. He hears on the news that his wife has been murdered, and he is the only suspect. He tries to kill himself, but whenever they wish his captors can flood his room with knockout gas, and they save him.

He then decides to escape, and seek revenge. He draws a human outline on his wall, and practices shadowboxing it. One night an extra chopstick arrives with his meal. He conceals it. Koreans use metal chopsticks, and he begins digging his way out of his cell. He’s already been imprisoned six years by then; it takes him nine more to see daylight. Just when he is on the verge of escaping, they gas him, and a hypnotist enters his cell, and tells him that he is in a field of grass. He sees himself tumbling out of a large suitcase, dressed in a black suit, onto a field of grass.

When he wakes, there is a large suitcase, and he is dressed in the black suit, but there is no grass. He is on a rooftop. He isn’t alone. There is a man sitting on the roof’s edge, holding a small dog, nerving himself to jump. Daesu walks over, grabs him by the tie before he can topple backwards, and holds him dangling. It’s a scene that will be paralleled much later by two other characters. “Not before I tell you my story,” he says to the man. Cut to him finishing, at which point the other guy says: “Now I will tell you mine.” But Daesu walks off.

Shortly after this a homeless man presents him with a phone, and tells him: “Don’t ask me any questions. I didn’t know anything.” When the first call comes, it is from his captor. Just the man he wants to find! A man who tells him that he has five days to figure out who imprisoned him, and more importantly, why, or something very bad will happen.

 

While Oldboy follows the structure of traditional revenge movies, with more bloody action than most, the vengeance isn’t cathartic, it is as destructive to the avenger as it is to those who suffer his payback. I won’t go into the parallels with the Oedipus story. There are too many spoilers there. But the story’s similarities to the ultimate revenge story, The Count of Monte Cristo, are obvious.

 

The movie has scenes so shocking that it achieved immediate cult status. One involves an octopus. Daesu goes to a sushi bar, and tells the server, Mi Do (Kang Hye Jeong) that he wants to eat “something alive.” I’ve eaten octopus many times in Korea. Usually, it has been chopped and grilled with pepper, but on two occasions its demise was very, very recent. Even after slicing the octopus twitches and writhes, as though trying to escape your chopsticks before you put the piece in your mouth. Its suckers may grab your lip, as though fighting to avoid your bite.

Mi Do brings him a live octopus, and asks: “Shall I slice it now?”

His response is to pick up the animal, a large one, maybe a foot and a half from top of the head to tip of the tentacle, and stuff its head in his mouth. As he fights to rip it with his teeth (they are chewy suckers), its tentacles are wrapping his hands, grabbing him by the nostrils, and generally turning the meal into a horror show. You know those movies where at the end is an announcement: “No animals were harmed in the making of this picture?” This isn’t one of them. Four octopi were used in the filming. Choi Man Sik is a Buddhist, and he prayed for each of them before starting to eat. Park was asked if he felt sorry for the actor, for making him do it. “I felt sorrier for the octopus.”

 

Still another remarkable scene comes when Daesu locates his former prison, and interrogates his jailer, to try to learn who hired the man. He uses the claw of a hammer to rip out some of the man’s teeth. When he opens the door of the office, he is looking at a long narrow hallway. (His was not the only cell; it seems running a private jail is a business.) Outside are about two dozen thugs filling the hall from the office to the elevator.

“Any Type AB?” A few raise their hands, and he passes them their boss. “Hurry, he’s lost a lot of blood!” And then after they carry away the boss, he attacks the rest.

If you see a short clip of part of this fight, it may resemble the sort of martial arts nonsense of a John Wick movie. It isn’t that. Yes, he fights an absurd number of people, armed only with a hammer, while some of them have two-by-fours. But it is a brutal fight. They overwhelm him, get him down, stomp him. Then he manages to keep fighting, and struggles back to his feet. He is knifed in the back, and keeps fighting. Park claims to do more storyboarding than most directors, and he did so for this scene. But after watching the star (who is an actor, not an action star) work with the stuntmen, when he saw how exhausted Choi was after rehearsing, he decided it would work better improvised. He asked Choi to do it in a continuous take. They had to shoot it several times, of course, but the scene in the movies runs without a cut. The scene lasts four minutes. If you have ever trained, you will have some idea. If not, try throwing continuous punches and kicks, and see how long you last. Daesu is a very good fighter, better than any of his opponents, but the scene is not a showcase for his skill. He prevails because he is a madman. The men in the hall are in the way of his vengeance, and he will not stop.

 

The movie has much more in store for Daesu, and for us. Thanks to the central mystery, the story proves as emotionally gripping as it is viscerally thrilling. We are left with an ambiguous ending. Park was asked if he cared to disambiguate it, and he said that he hoped that the audiences would leave the theatre talking about it, deciding for themselves what it all meant. Based on last night’s crowd, I think he got his wish.