Oldboy
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Oldboy (올드보이) is a 2003 South Korean movie directed by Park Chan-wook based on a Japanese manga of the same name. The film is a story of revenge and utilizes many elements of film noir to examine the nature of sin and morality. The bare outlines of the plot are reminiscent of The Count of Monte Cristo (the director himself makes the homage explicit at one point), but the movie diverges freely from its source.
The film won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and had won high praises from director Quentin Tarantino. The unique story of Oldboy was so popular that it caught Hollywood's eyes. The script was bought over and it is currently being remade in the United States by director Justin Lin, best known for the teen crime drama Better Luck Tomorrow.
Tagline: 15 years forced in a cell, only 5 days given to seek revenge.
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Plot
The film begins in the year 1988. Oh Dae-su (Min-sik Choi), is a Korean everyman with a wife and daughter. At the start of the film he has been picked up by police for being drunk and disorderly, and has to be bailed out by his friend. While his friend is in a phonebooth on the phone with Dae-su's daughter, Dae-su is kidnapped by persons unknown.
Dae-su is then seen in a private prison that resembles a shabby hotel room. He has been kept there for two months with no word of who is holding him there or why. He is gassed into unconsciousness when he becomes violent or suicidal (or when they need to cut his hair or maintain the suite). His only contact with the outside world is through the television, from which he learns one day that his wife has been murdered and his daughter has vanished (and that he is himself a prime suspect). As months go by, Dae-su slides into near-madness.
Attempting to get a grip on his sanity, Dae-su fills several notebooks with an autobiography-cum-prison diary, but is unable to figure out who would hate him so profoundly as to imprison him like this. He forces himself to train, punching at the walls of his prison until thick calluses form on his knuckles. When one of his deliveries of fried dumplings (his only food while in captivity) turns out to have an extra metal chopstick, he conceals it and uses it to slowly dig a hole into one of the walls. Over the next fifteen years, he works out, follows current events on TV, and loosens enough bricks to glimpse the outside world once again.
Just as abruptly as he was captured, Dae-su is set free—with a new suit of clothes, a wallet full of money, a cellphone, and his prison diaries. His fifteen years of "imaginary training" have paid off: when a gang of thugs attack him, he fends them off with only his fists. Then he meets Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang), a girl who works in a sushi bar; she takes pity on Dae-su and takes him in.
Dae-su meets Woo-jin (Ji-tae Yu), a man who claims to be the one who imprisoned him. He offers to play a game with Dae-su: Find out why all this happened to him in the next five days. If he fails, Mi-do will die. If he succeeds, Woo-jin will kill himself.
Based on the taste of the dumplings that he ate for 15 years while imprisoned and seeing the name "Blue Dragon" on a receipt fragment once, Dae-su goes to various Chinese restaurants with "Blue Dragon" in the name in order to determine exactly which restaurant it was. Once he finds the right one, called "Magic Blue Dragon", he follows the delivery boy on one of his deliveries to the prison. There, he ties up the prison's manager and tortures him by pulling out his teeth with a claw hammer. Dae-su learns from the manager's tape recordings that Woo-jin did indeed have him locked up, but the only reason he would give is: "Oh Dae-su talks too much." Dae-su and Mi-do grow closer together, and one night the two of them make love while on the road.
With Mi-do's help, Dae-su follows a trail that leads back to his old high school, where Woo-jin was a fellow student. One day, as it turned out, Dae-su had spied on Woo-jin and his sister Soo-ah, who where having an incestuous relationship, and mentioned it to one of his own friends, just before Dae-su left the school for Seoul. The rumor grew out of proportion until it involved Soo-ah being pregnant. But in the end, even she believed it and killed herself rather than face public humiliation. Dae-su confronts Woo-jin with all of this information, but Woo-jin has an even more devastating revelation. He gives Dae-su a photo album, the first picture of which is a family portrait of himself, his wife, and his daughter. The remaining photos in the album are of his daughter growing older and becoming Mi-do. By carefully manipulating both of their lives—Dae-su's since his incarceration and Mi-do's since her father vanished—and hypnotizing each of them independently, he was able to cause Dae-su and Mi-do to commit incest as well.
Dae-su is horrified, and begs Woo-jin not to tell Mi-do, even going so far as to cut off his own tongue so that he will never talk too much again. With his thirst for vengeance that was his sole reason for living finally spent, Woo-jin spares Mi-do from knowing and shoots himself in the head.
In an epilogue set in a wintry landscape, Dae-su goes to a hypnotist (the same one whom Woo-jin hired to hypnotize both Dae-su and Mi-do) and asks for her help to forget the secret. She uses hypnosis to split Dae-su into two personalities: the "Monster", who remembers the secret, and the "original" Dae-su, who doesn't. The "Monster", she tells him, will die after taking seven steps, one step will equal 10 years, and the monster will die at seventy, a peaceful death. When Mi-do finds Dae-su, a number of footprints are shown behind him. Unable to face the truth, Dae-su has chosen to live a life with Mi-do as his lover in ignorance of their true relationship.
Trivia
- The squid being eaten alive was no special effect but a real squid; several had to be sacrificed during the making of the movie. Actor Choi Min-sik is a Buddhist so he prayed each time after eating a squid.
- Computer generated imagery include the ant coming out of Oh Dae-su's arm (according to the making-of on the DVD the whole arm was computer-generated imagery), the ants crawling over Oh Dae-su afterwards and the knife in his back in the infamous corridor fighting scene; moreover computers were used to tint the picture in the college flashback scenes and to clean up the lake Woo-jin's sister falls into.
- When Oh Dae-su wakes up and sees Mi-do read his diary he grabs it and jumps back into bed, bumping his head; the making-of shows the bumping was not intentional but the scene made it into the final version.
- The final scene's snowy landscape was filmed in New Zealand.
- Oldboy is around #90 in IMDb's top 250 movies.
- Actor Choi Min-sik improvised most of his lines during the confrontation with Woo-jin, including his old school hymn.
Cast
- Dae-su – Min-sik Choi
- Woo-jin – Ji-tae Yu
- Mi-do – Hye-jeong Kang
Awards
- 57th Cannes Film Festival
- Grand Prix of the Jury – Park Chan-wook
- Nominated de Palme D'or – Park Chan-wook
- Grand Bell Awards – South Korea 2004
- Best Director – Park Chan-wook
- Best Actor – Choi Min-sik
- Best Edition – Kim Sang-beom
- Best Illumination – Park Hyun-won
- Best Music – Cho Young-wuk
- 37th Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya - Sitges 2004
- Maria Award (Best Film)
- Jos Luis Guarner Award (Critics' Best Film)
- Bergen International Film Festival 2004
- Audience Award
- British Independent Fim Awards 2004
- Best Film
- European Film Awards 2004
- Nominated for Screen International Award
External links
- Template:Imdb title
- Tartan Video (American distributor for Oldboy) (http://www.tartanvideousa.com/)de:Oldboy