You got some fucked up frends.
Early on in Fight Club, that’s what Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) says to Ed Norton after meeting the Gothically damaged Marla. You got some fucked up friends! He’s practically gloating or giddy, ecstatic that he’s met someone more damaged and deranged than he is. It’s lonely in the hinterlands of sanity and good taste, and Tyler Durden is revelling in the fact that he’s no longer alone.
That’s what Old Boy is like. Old Boy is your fucked up friend. The guy that takes you out drinking in a rental car, tells you to drive, and says “I’m going to pull the parking brake at random three times tonight. It’s your job to keep us alive.” And he means that. And he does it. And then he sues the rental car company when his Ford Contour skids sideways into a brick wall, claiming that the brakes failed. Sure it’s a hell of a ride, but do you necessarily want to go out with that guy?
After the film, Uncle Matt said “I don’t know how I feel about Koreans having an imagination and a filmmaking budget.” The Koreans are some crazy fuckers, that’s for sure. Uncle Matt told me about footage he’d seen of a new trend in young Korean protests. A bunch of youngsters line up in front of the building they’re protesting, and all chop off a finger.
Old Boy won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, and with the right kind of eyes you can see why. It’s the story of Oh-Dae Su, a perfectly anonymous Korean businessman who is abducted off the street on a rainy night and spends the next fifteen years imprisoned in a cramped hotel room with epilepsy inducing wallpaper. He is given no reason for his imprisonment; only a plate of fried dumplings to eat on a daily basis and a television to help pass the time. A year into his prison term, television shows him the murder of his wife and brands him a suspect. Then that dark news is evenutally buried in the blur of news programs and the march of time. A month away from an escape tunnel being completed, without warning, he is released. Dressed in a fine suit, given a wallet full of cash and a cell phone, Oh Dae-Su sets out to find out who imprisoned him and why.
What follows is a parade of brutality. South Korean filmmaker Chanwook Park has spent more time than I have studying the works of David Fincher, and it shows. The money shot in Old Boy is a videogame come to life. Oh-Dae Su fights his way down a hallway filled with thugs, the camera tracking laterally alongside the action. This isn’t the balletic wire-fu, Matrix style or martial arts fighting. This is a sloppy street brawl where nobody has any move fancier than a two by four to the head, a punch to the jaw, or a knife stabbed into a back. Without glossy special effects and over-amplified sound effects, this one shot is a quiet marvel.
That is the trick of Old Boy, the suffering feels all too tactile. For a film so filled with bloody encounters, the gore level is relatively low and the body count isn’t much higher. (If you have a fear of dentists, two of the torture scenes will be more excruciating then you can imagine.) Violent acts have repercussions, and leave wounds that linger well after the fighting stops. But depictions of pain aren’t what makes Old Boy your fucked up friend; that’s way too easy. A lot of films show pain and determination, and none of them are that fucked up at all. In fact, physical pain is one dimensional and boring. Your fucked up friend has an axis of crazy that goes far beyond the physical, and so does Old Boy.
The final explanation of Oh-Dae Su’s imprisonment comes with a gut-punch of a twist that leaves you sickened and stunned. As with all good twists, you don’t see it coming until it”s too late, and then the pieces fall together in a vertiginous manner. You see it coming together, and you hope to God that you’re wrong but in the pit of your stomach you know exactly where it’s going.
Houston, we have lift off.
It’s sickeningly effective in a film built around tactile pain and actions with consequences. After an hour and forty five minutes of trying to unravel the puzzle, and watching in frustrated horror as Oh-Dae Su is manipulated along by his tomentor, when the full picture is revealed you cringe. Your fucked up friend is good for sharing stories, but he’s fucking nuts. The best thing you can say for him is that you only see him once a year. That’s plenty. You don’t need a weekly reminder that underneath it all you’re not the crazy fucker he is.
Thus is the dilemma of Old Boy. Sure, it’s fucked up, but do you need to see it? Is there a value in watching this, other than to feel better about yourself because you’re not part of the freakshow? When you comprehend the grand design of the film, there is an admirable over-all logic to it. Underneath the horror, there is an interesting concept of the revenge film turned backwards, and ideas about how vengeance is served up. But do you need to see it?
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