An oafish drunk is abducted then imprisoned in a sealed facsimile of a moldy living space. His indifferent captors offer no explanation or sentence to their raging prisoner. For fifteen long years, Oh Dae-su's only light source is a bulb; his food the same serving of fried take away each and every day. His sleep cycle is maintained by Valium gas and suicide attempts are swiftly thwarted. All Oh Dae-su can do then is box the walls and comb his memories for whichever dreadful act landed him in this hell. Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi's manga, from which this film is adapted, posits this state of confinement as a necessary step to realising a new, hyper-masculine super-identity. On the page, Oh Dae-su becomes the kind of stoic, swaggering mensch seen in comics aimed at middle-aged men; he is now a bar-brawler who beds and broods.
Park Chan-wook's film retains this idea of muscle memory, but the director allows his lead character to genuinely unravel. The long, anonymous incarceration dismantles Oh Dae-su, stripping him back to something sharp and venal. All the aggravated repetition has reconstructed him as a prowling beast, possessed of considerable violence. A notable departure from a source that was much more interested in 9-to-5 wish-fulfilment. This new dominant and animalistic persona proves useful to Oh Dae-su when he's bopping his way closer to the parties who stole his life but, when this issue is resolved, can it readapt to less base circumstances? Choi Min-sik's Oh Dae-su is a queasy centre in Oldboy. His revenge characterised not by the triumphant, but instead a strange and self-destructive necessity. A reason for his punishment is the only thing that can make sense of the existential demolition job that has been perpetrated on this man. It's the only real drive this former salaryman has left. Complicating this situation further is his constant, prickling fear that he truly deserves what has happened to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment