Film Journal: Oldboy (2003)
dir. Park Chan-Wook
This journal was originally written on April 19, 2015 for a high school English class assignment.
Your gravest mistake wasn’t failing to find the answer. You can’t find the right answer if you ask the wrong questions.
Oldboy is a story about an ordinary father and a heavy drinker named Oh Dae-Su who is drunk and chained in a police station. After a friend of his comes and gets him out, they make a telephone call to Oh’s family, saying a “Happy Birthday” to Oh’s daughter since it’s her birthday. While his friend is on the phone, suddenly Oh disappears from the street. Once he wakes up, he finds himself locked in a private prison without knowing why is he there, and how does he get there. He does not have any idea on how long will he be there, who gets him imprisoned and why. No one tells him and he desperately waits for the day that he will be free. He survives by eating dumplings every day and watching a small box of television as his only media to know what’s happening in the outside world, where he finds out through the news that his wife has been killed. He also writes some journals about his days in prison.
15 years have passed and he is finally a free man. Yet he realizes he is not truly free that he is now a monster full of revenge. Being so clueless with what has happened to him, suddenly a bum bumps him and gives him a bunch of cash and a cellphone. There, he begins the journey of unravelling the mystery behind all these. Later he gets a phone call from the man who imprisons him, the man says “I’m a sort of scholar, and my field of study is you”. Piece by piece he collects all the information and starts to solve the puzzle set by this man. During his journey, he meets a beautiful young girl, Mido (played by Kang Hye-Jung). They fall in love with each other despite the huge age difference they have. However, the love story turns out to be one of the most tragic love stories ever.
This is movie is very, very, very well-crafted. It has a lot of action scene that is so well directed, well-executed. If you remember the scene when Oh Dae-Su beats a bunch of gangster in a narrow corridor, you will understand what I’m saying here. The plot is really well-scripted, the process of dehumanization with a lot of things going on throughout the movie: loneliness, violence, sadness, revenge, love and tragedy; the breakdown of a mystery from layer to layer and ends up to a brilliant twist. Thanks to the director Park Chan-Wook (and the rest of the crew, the screenwriter, the cinematographer, etc…) for this brilliant work. Because of Oldboy, Park Chan-Wook gained worldwide fame and respect as a contemporary filmmaker, one from Quentin Tarantino who gave this movie a Grand Prix award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. And it’s an undeniable fact that Oldboy — along with Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003) — also put South Korea to the modern cinema radar.
Another thing that really helps the movie into perfection is the performance of the brilliant actors, especially Choi Min-Sik who plays the main character. He did his best to build this character of Oh Dae-Su, he even ate an octopus alive. His role as Oh Dae-Su also become a breakthrough for his worldwide fame. The one who did the casting has done his/her job very well. Casting Kang Hye-Jung as Oh’s lover is a great decision despite the fact that it was her second time playing a role on the big screen. Having Yoo Ji-Tae as the main antagonist character is a bit surprising, they cast a typical cool boy whom everyone adores, yet he did the job very well: cool, calm and mysterious. Other supporting performances that are also stand out in the movie are the performance from Oh Dal-Su as the prison guard and Kim Byung-Ok as the enemy’s sidekick. Later these actors became some of the most respected actors in South Korea.
