A Strange Double-Revenge (Octopus Fans Please Look Away)

Rating: Null/10 (28 October 2005)

Oldboy is a twisty, confounding shape-shifter of a film, but it doesn't give one the impression of leaning on its own narrative conceits like a lot of movies do. There's more to Oldboy than story contrivance; there's real manic energy being expended, and there's a tonal complexity that makes it seem almost novelistic. Most movies would be content to be as dynamic as Oldboy, as syntactically accomplished, as fearless, but Oldboy is also existentialistic; it's an action movie that not only dabbles in philosophy but, in its way, puts across a picture of the universe. It seems as immersed in Zeitgiest as the German films of the twenties; it conveys a sense of a world tottering on the edge of sanity, a landscape composed of equal parts paranoia, bloodlust and desperate longing. It has urgency, but it doesn't only have urgency; it has a kind of indolence underneath this, a gravity keeping the crazy parts of the story from flying apart. The film is kinetic, but there's an undercurrent that flows a lot more sluggishly, that balances the frantic surface action. There's a strange calm at the center of Oldboy, the tranquility one might perceive while peering into a bottomless abyss.
The plot can only be described as a devious piece of manipulation, an implausible yet deeply satisfying load of malarkey. It begins in a prison cell that looks like a hotel room; Dae-Su, an average man with a few guilty secrets, awakes from a bender to find himself imprisoned here, not knowing who is responsible for his captivity, or what he did to deserve it. Being locked up, not to mention intermittently drugged and subjected to the arts of a hypnotist, is liable to put anyone in a vengeful mood, and this is just what happens to Dae-Su, who endures years of tedium relieved only by television, wall-punching and the occasional suicide attempt, only to be released suddenly into an outside world scarcely less inscrutable than that of the prison. Dae-Su, haggard and thirsty for revenge, sets out to learn the identity of the man responsible for his incarceration, and in the process becomes involved with a young chef, Mi-Do, who aids him in his endeavors. The ex-prisoner's adversary, Woo-Jin, is some kind of wealthy but depressed playboy, who seems to enjoy toying with the hapless Dae-Su, but may in fact have more perverse things on his mind than simple torture.
The unraveling of the puzzle is handled with astonishing skill by Chan-Wook Park, a director who rivals Tarantino for cinematic flair. Park's formidable sense of syntax is demonstrated in the early passages of Dae-Su's imprisonment; Park compresses time beautifully here, and conveys Dae-Su's progression from disorientation to wild anger to sharply-honed, desperate anger. Then there are moments where Park seems to merely revel in the opportunity to create strange cinematic effects. The best one happens during a fight-scene in a corridor; Park stages the scene as one unbroken shot, the camera tracking laterally down the length of the hallway where Dae-Su, proficient in fighting after years of practicing in his cell, tangles with an endless succession of martial arts baddies. The scene seems like an embodiment of everything the film is: it's both kinetic and strangely still; the cut-away quality of the shot creates the sense of staring at ants in an ant-farm, the objectivity of, if not a god, then someone capable of adopting a god-like point-of-view. Trying to make sense of his situation is, for Dae-Su, a little like trying to piece together fragments of bad dreams, hoping for some ultimate clarity; not unlike what Kafka's heroes went through in their efforts to hash out the rules of a universe where the rules were beyond comprehension, where the shape of things was always changing. Park creates a labyrinth for Dae-Su to navigate, a maze of shifting walls where the shifting is anything but random. The syntax, the beautiful fitting-together of the images, creates the sense of an elegant but violent, inclement, pressure-cooker universe.
The movie seems suffused with existential dread, the jitteriness and confusion of modern life. Dae-Su is a kind of puppet, his actions determined beforehand not by fate or god but by his mysterious antagonist, Woo-Jin, who is also ruled by things beyond his understanding, his conscious control. Neither man is ultimately the master of his fate; they circle each other like lonely worlds in orbit, spinning closer and closer, doomed to collide and destroy each other. The gravity that holds these men together is a mutual need for vengeance; the story details Dae-Su's quest for revenge, then turns itself inside-out and shows that Woo-Jin is really trying to get revenge on Dae-Su. Movies often tackle this theme of revenge-lust as a kind of trap, but in Oldboy the trap seems bigger than this. Dae-Su is a bug in a maze, but Woo-Jin is a bug in a bigger maze. The universe becomes labyrinthine, human motivation boiled down to simple, bloody imperatives. The movie is savage, sometimes absurdly so (a live octopus is consumed at one point; at another a man has his teeth yanked out with the claw-end of a hammer), but the savagery is only part of the picture. There's a sadness underneath the whole thing, conveyed most touchingly by the relationship between Dae-Su and Mi-Do, who become lovers, spirits united at least for awhile against the cruelty, the confusion of life. It's easy to see a movie like Oldboy only in terms of surface effect, of action and blood and sadism, but there are undercurrents running through everything that show how deeply-felt the film-making is despite the shock-scenes, the Asian-cinema hysteria, the reveling in violence. It's a film at once simple and intricate, elegant and brutal, violent and tender.