Oldboy, South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s dramatic thriller about revenge and forgiveness, premiered internationally at the 57th Cannes Film Festival, where it took the Grand Prix.
South Korea, 1988. Businessman Oh Dae-su is going home to his wife and daughter, who turns three that day. He gets drunk and attracts the attention of the police. A childhood friend rescues him from the police station, but soon, for an unknown reason, he is deprived of his freedom again. Oh Dae-su is imprisoned in a private facility the same evening, where he will spend the next 15 long years alone. The burnt-out man only has two aims: to establish the reason for this cruel imprisonment and to take revenge. The answer lies in his past, dating back to school and the forbidden love story of his classmate Lee Woo-jin.
Oldboy is the second part of Park’s The Vengeance Trilogy, which also includes Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance. Known for extremely violent, almost body-horror scenes, this is still a film about the need for forgiveness and the mutual suffering that violence brings to both the victim and the aggressor.
Years-long mutual revenge coupled with Oh Dae-su’s obsessive desire to find the reason for his imprisonment suggest the impossibility of victory and satisfaction from retribution. Reconciliation is still possible, but to achieve it one must comprehend the origins of enmity and atone for the sins of the past through voluntary punishment. Based on a Japanese manga and adopting its stylistic tropes, such as acrobatic fights and explicit violence, Oldboy is like a subtle and visually masterful embodiment of Ancient Greek tragedies. It premiered at Cannes, where Jury President Quentin Tarantino called it the best film he had seen at the festival.
The film will be screened in Korean with Russian subtitles.
Oldboy
Dir. Park Chan-wook
South Korea, 2003. 120 min. 18+