Oldboy

I've completed the Vengeance Trilogy, finally. I didn't necessarily watch them in order, but there is no order in the sense that the film's are somehow related. I'm actually glad I saw them in the order that I did. The Jesus waif at the video store was right. Chinjeolhan geumjassi is the one to see first. I met a couple of Korean girls the other day who were lost, trying to find a Korean grocery. They're lucky they grabbed me. I took them straight away, and as we made our way downtown we had a nice chat about Korean television and movies. They were quite surprised that I knew Full House. I think I accidentally saw a Mandarin-dubbed version of it the last time I went to visit Bob. They agreed that Chinjeolhan geumjassi was a great film, and had only praise for Choi Min-sik, but suggested that I watch more of Li Yeong-ae's work.

I didn't know how to feel after I watched Oldboy. Again, the need for vengeance is explained very well, and the concept of justice is striking but I think it's more challenging to decide who is right in this one. Both of the main characters have committed wrongs, but I guess in the end I side with Oh Dae-su, who has clearly suffered more than Lee Woo-jin. There is a lot of common imagery between this film and Chinjeolhan - snowy mountains, a schoolhouse, abandoned flats, a salon, funky wallpaper and of course prisons. The music is remarkable in this film as well, and if I can get my hands on the soundtrack to any of the three films, it would be a good day.

The set up goes like this, if you've read the comic then you can skip this part: A drunk is released from police custody by his longtime friend No Joo-hwan played by Ji Dae-han who also appears in Chinjeolhan. I recognized him by the way he eats a bowl of ramen in the cafe. While Joo-hwan is on the telephone explaining to Dae-su's wife what has happened, Dae-su goes missing. The film continues to follow Dae-su's confinement. He's held in some kind of prison, but it's not a government prison that's obvious. He makes a list of all the people who might want to do this to him, and spends fifteen years getting in shape and vowing revenge. He doesn't really plan his revenge like Geumjassi did, but he's plenty mad. He's sick of eating substandard gyoza, and I can sympathize. He manages to dig his way out of the cell, almost only to find himself next breaking out of a suitcase on a rooftop. He meets a guy who wants to jump off the roof, but Dae-su won't let him. He wants to tell the guy played by Oh Kwang-rok who also played one of the anarchists in Boksuneun naui geot and appeared in Chinjeolhan, his story of vengeance. As Dae-su walks away from the block of flats, we see the jumper fall to his death, mashing in the roof of a perfectly good Kia (I think).

It's on, Oh Dae-su is free and he wants to kick some ass. He knows that his wife is dead and that he has been framed for her death. He comes across some grubs on the pavement and takes a cigarette from one of them. They don't take kindly to that, and attempt to kick his ass. Oh comes back with some very good moves, allegedly peformed by Choi himself, and goes on his way. Sitting on the pavement staring at a fish tank, he is approached by a homeless guy who hands him a cellphone and a wallet. I think the wallet is full of money, but I don't know what won look like so maybe it was just paper. He's hungry and makes his way to a sushi restaurant and asks for something living. The chef thinks that she has met Oh before, but they decide that it must be because of her television show that Oh watched while in confinement. She hands him a small octopus and he doesn't waste any time filling his stomach. He receives a call on the cell phone and it happens to be the voice of his captor. He collapses and the sushi chef takes him home. There's a reason for all this seemingly normal behaviour which is revealed later in the movie. While Dae-su sleeps, Mi-do, played by Kang Hye-jeong reads his journals. She's fascinated by his story, but he doesn't like her reading it.

Oh decides that the only way he can find his captor is to locate the shitty dumpling shop that used to deliver his meals. He remembers seeing a tag to the Blue Dragon restaurant. He tries every Blue Dragon restaurant in Seoul, but can't find the right mix of ingredients. Almost losing hope, he sees one last add and checks out the cuisine. Score. After telling Mi-do that he can't trust her, he takes a hammer from her flat and chases the delivery boy back to the block of flats where he was kept. He fights his way onto the floor and discovers that the place is totally wired for video and that the surveillance company has had a contract to do what they did to Dae-su. He goes to town on the manager's jaw with the hammer, and then the crew and pretty much kicks butt. He likes to fight, and gets stabbed in the back which doesn't hinder him.

Thinking that his daughter has been adopted by a Swedish family, he plods on trying to piece together the mystery. He visits his old friend Joo-hwan who runs an internet cafe. They google the alias of the captor and find a connection with their old school. Oh goes to the school and rifles through the records to discover the identity of his captor. A rather youngish Lee Woo-jin played by Yu Ji-tae who's actually younger than I, but is meant to play a character who finished school more than ten years before me. Tsk tsk tsk. At the school, Oh gets all the clues he needs - he discovers a flyer for a salon where he learns of the connection between himself and Woo-jin. It goes back to his friend Joo-hwan who is killed while giving details about Woo-jin and making disparaging remarks about Woo-jin's sister in the process. Woo-jin just happened to be listening.

It seems that Woo-jin's sister, Soo-ah, played by Yun Jin-seo had an undeservedly bad reputation and this caused her to kill herself. In turn, Woo-jin swore that he would kill every woman the perpetrator of the rumours had ever loved. See, Woo-jin had loved his sister in that unnatural highly taboo way. He believed that it was consensual and therefore not exactly wrong. This is pretty much why I can't give him any sympathy for what he ends up doing. He attributes the rumours to Oh Dae-su, and after the highschool retrospective is over Dae-su learns that he has unknowingly allowed Woo-jin to regain custody of Mi-do. At this point, the viewer is treated to the final bit of mystery - a piece of mystery I had figured out after the sushi restaurant scene. Woo-jin shows a photo album to Dae-su in which he learns that he has been diddling his own daughter. He begs Woo-jin not to tell Mi-do, which he agrees to do after Dae-su cuts off his own tongue and grovels at the feet of Lee. As Dae-su is left spitting blood in the aftermath of a gun battle which featured Kim Byeong-ok as Mr. Han, and also as the weirdo preacher guy in Chinjeolhan, Lee goes down in the elevator and shoots himself in the head.

Disgusted with himself, Oh Dae-su disappears. This is the part I said I would explain later, earlier. While in confinement, Dae-su had been visited by a hypnotist who programmed him to think that Mi-do was just some chick, and to fall in love with her. Woo-jin had also been looking after Mi-do since the death of her mother, there never was any adoptive Swedish family, and he had hypnotized her to act in certain ways when she would later meet Dae-su. After the whole shoe-licking, tongue-cutting episode in the penthouse, Dae-su tracks down the hypnotist and convinces her to hypnotize him again so that he can forget everything that he has done to Mi-do. She agrees, and Mi-do finds him in the mountains and I think that was the end.

It has occurred to me that my posts, particularly the ones about movies, were much more interesting if I wrote them while drunk. Things have changed, haven't they?