The Prisoner

I believe it was Nietzsche who said that what does not kill us makes us stronger. I’m sure everyone can recall at least one negative experience they’ve gone through that’s left them a little tougher, a little wiser, a little more aware or appreciative. But for all the wisdom or strength these events may impart, we don’t always come out of them as well-adjusted individuals. Case in point: “Oldboy” (http://imdb.com/title/tt0364569/).

Dae-su (Min-sik Choi) is a pudgy South Korean businessman who ends up at the police station one rainy night for being drunk & flirting with another man’s girl. Though he already has a wife & young daughter, Dae-su has apparently got something of a roving eye. He causes a bit of a ruckus at the station before his buddy, Joo-hwan (Dae-han Ji), comes to fetch him. Afterward, they stop at a phone booth to call Dae-su’s wife & daughter (it’s the daughter’s birthday). But just as Joo-hwan is about to hand the phone to Dae-su, he finds that his friend has disappeared.

Next, we see a foot unlatching a small door - like a doggie-door with a lock - just above the floor. Dae-su’s head pokes out, & he pleads with this person to explain what he’s doing there, or at least to let him know how much longer he has to stay there, as it’s already been two months. A tray of fried dumplings is placed on the floor & pushed through the door. The foot locks it again & the person walks back down the hall.

Dae-su’s room - or, more aptly, cell - looks like a slightly off-centre (with just a hint of creepy) hotel room; it has a bed, tv, writing desk, & bathroom (sans door), even some art on the walls. But every so often, a music box-like song begins to play, & the room fills with noxious gas. Once Dae-su is knocked out, his clothes are changed, his room is cleaned, & his hair is cut.

This goes on for 15 years.

Over time, Dae-su begins to change. Physically, he grows leaner & stronger, yet appears much older than he probably is. He has little opportunity to do anything but think & watch television, other than engaging in martial arts training (his sparring partner is the outline of a person he’s made on the wall). The tv helps him to keep track of time & the events shaping the outside world (though he must have also watched a host of documentaries, because he later exhibits a “weird wealth of knowledge”, as I wrote in my notes). Sometimes he hallucinates that ants are crawling on him.

One day, he hears on the news that his wife has been found murdered. Witness testimony places him at the scene of the crime, & a family photo album has been stolen from his home. This is more than enough to push Dae-su over the edge on which he has been teetering - & if you’ve ever seen David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”, the freak-out Dae-su has here will remind you of Bill Pullman’s ‘head trauma’, just a bit.

After that, Dae-su’s eyes linger somewhere between extremely tired & more than a little insane. He attempts to dig his way out through the bricks in the wall. He also starts carving lines in the back of his hand (tattooing might be a more apt description) to indicate the number of years he’s been incarcerated, & writing down his thoughts in a notebook, along with the names of all the people he fears he may have wronged who might have wanted to seek vengeance against him. Whoever it is, he vows to escape, & to have his own revenge.

Shortly thereafter, while he’s half-unconscious from the knock-out gas, a woman comes to speak to him. She tells him he is on a plane, & that if he looks down, he will see a lush, grassy field. She rings a small bell, & - in a beautiful overhead shot - we, too, see the field. A trunk is situated there, from which emerges Dae-su, released as inexplicably as he was abducted.

But there is no one he can turn to, & he has nowhere to go. Branded a murderer & now a fugitive from the law, Dae-su tries to adjust to the outside world & to people (especially women) again. For a while, he simply wanders. After some bizarre encounters - a (suicidal?) man with a small dog, a group of thugs who accost him in the street, the mysterious person who hands him a cell phone & a wallet full of money outside a restaurant - Dae-su meets Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang), a sushi chef. She tends to him when he passes out, & they quickly forge a relationship, which ranges, over the course of the film, from him trying to hump her as she’s sitting on the toilet, to a really sweet moment when he helps her dry her hair. During the latter scene, he wonders to himself if she would feel the same way about him had he not gone through his traumatic experience, for he knows - as the audience does - that his imprisonment has made him, in just about every sense, a better man.

Mi-do helps Dae-su gather information: she learns his daughter was sent to live with a family in Sweden, & obtains a map to his wife’s grave. She also joins him in his obsessive quest to find the restaurant that made the dumplings that were his only meals for a decade & a half. By doing this, he hopes to find some clue as to who his captor may have been.

One thing eventually leads to another, & Dae-su does, indeed, learn his enemy’s identity. In the process, he also beats the living tar out of a hallway full of guys, gets tortured & does some torturing (in a moment somewhat reminiscent of a memorable scene from “Bloodsucking Freaks”), & is re-acquainted with Joo-hwan, who lends his talents to Dae-su’s investigation. But by the time his enemy is revealed, said adversary is already one step ahead of Dae-su (&, it appears, always has been), & Mi-do’s life is threatened. Unless Dae-su can figure out, in the next five days, WHY he was imprisoned, Mi-do will die - just as his wife was murdered - along with any other woman Dae-su has ever loved. Much as Dae-su would relish bashing his foe’s head in, he must make a choice: uncover the awful truth & consequently save Mi-do, or have the revenge he has sought, heart & soul, for so very long?

By far, the best thing about “Oldboy” is Min-sik Choi. I was floored to learn that the man in the opening scene at the police station & the one released from 15 years of captivity were portrayed by the same actor. Yes, I mean in the predominantly physical sense, but also in that Choi truly embodies the determined, eccentric, dangerous aspects of Dae-su, in addition to the tender, vulnerable side...& yet he can do 'drunken jerk' quite nicely, as well. The story gets a trifle confusing now & again (this is either down to the way the manga on which it is based plays out or the fact that there are 4 or 5 writers credited for the screenplay), but it’s never boring (especially once the villain, whom I called in my notes “almost operatic”, comes into the picture), & things do make sense in the end - tragic & cruel & brutal as that sense may be (for both viewers & characters). There are some terrific visuals, including a perspective-oriented scene in which Dae-su literally pursues a memory, & a stunning final shot just prior to the credits. I liked the musical score, as well.

This film comes from the same director who gave us the “Cut” segment of “Three...Extremes”, Park Chan Wook. And while one can see shades of the various “Oldboy” themes in that piece, “Oldboy” itself seems to dwell in the twisted shadow of Takashi Miike (including one action, on the part of Dae-su, ripped right out of “Ichi The Killer”), as well as the martial arts films Hong Kong has been putting out for years. I have seen only a handful of Korean pictures, so I’m not sure if movies from that country have truly found their voice yet (consummate though I have found the ones I’ve watched, "Oldboy" included). It may be that they are simply eclipsed by the more well-known genre films of Japan & China. But, from what I’ve been seeing, they are definitely catching up. And fast.


Note: If you’ve already seen “Oldboy”, or are just curious (& don’t mind spoilers), check out this site with regard to the Indian re-make, “Zinda”: http://www.indiaglitz.com/channels/hindi/review/8003.html
(credit must go to asian_cinema for this)


( More stuff I stole from el_jefe59. )