OLDBOY, New Tricks
Talking Park Chan-wook with Hoai-Tran Bui
Happy National Cinema Day! If you’re looking for something to see at the $4 ticket range (and have a stomach for some fairly extreme violence), the 20th-anniversary restoration of Oldboy would be a great pick … if for no other reason than it’s not currently streaming! (I suspect it will be back soon, though.)
It’s not an exaggeration to say Oldboy was a game-changer for Korean cinema. The film vaulted director Park Chan-wook onto the global stage and helped crystallize the perception of his country’s national industry as one to watch following a decade of radical experimentation and reinvention. The best way to watch the movie is completely cold, but if you must know a little bit about what you’re getting yourself into with this revenge story about a wrongfully imprisoned man, take a gander at the trailer.
If you really want to contextualize the film, you’re in luck — the beloved movie podcast Blank Check is currently in the middle of a miniseries devoted to the films of Park Chan-wook. The kickoff episode gives a lot of helpful context to better understand Korean cinema and why Park Chan-wook matters within it.
While Marshall and the Movies is not just becoming a Blank Check aftershow, I am very pleased to have one of the show’s recent guests on today’s newsletter to help break down Oldboy (even though she appeared there to discuss Thirst). My guest today is Hoai-Tran Bui, a dear friend and fellow critic who is currently the Entertainment Editor at Inverse. She previously was an editor and film critic at /Film, and her work has appeared in USA Today and The Washington Post. She is a Rotten Tomatoes-certified critic and co-hosts a Doctor Who/Star Trek podcast called Trekking Through Time and Space.
Join us as we delve deep into the heart of Oldboy and its director!
Was Oldboy your intro to Park Chan-wook?
Yes, and what an intro it is!
Was it also the first thing you saw from that wave of the New Korean Cinema?
Yeah, I would say so. It came out in 2003, but I didn't end up watching it until later, probably around 2007-2008 when I was in high school. It had already gained its reputation as being this extremely edgy, very transgressive piece of media. At the time when I was in high school, I was exploring a lot of Asian films — mostly based on my friends and my obsession with Japanese dramas. K-dramas weren't quite as big at the time; we were really into J-dramas. I had picked up a few K-dramas, and they were okay. So I was just like, "Wow, Japanese films and TV seem much better!" But then I watched Oldboy and I was like, "Holy crap."
Did you find it lived up to the reputation of being as transgressive and extreme as it had been rumored?
I'd say so. I found it to be very much living up to the reputation of just being extremely brutal, lurid, and violent. I can't say that I particularly found it to be appealing, personally. Park Chan-wook is a director that I, for the most part, more admire than is personally one of my favorite directors. Oldboy is definitely one of those movies that you watch once and are like, "Wow, that's gonna mess me up for a long time!" I can't say that it became a comfort watch in any way, but it definitely changed and molded my mind in a lot of ways. It was definitely like, "Oh wow, this is something that's happening right now." It felt very electric. It had been out five years by that point, but this felt like something new and exciting.
What do you enjoy about films from the New Korean Cinema era?
Many people have talked about this before: it's a juggling of genre and tone in a way that you weren't really seeing in Western movies (and that you still don't really see much now). A lot of Western films still struggle with having more than two genres. There's such a whiplash of tone, but it's done with such confidence and boldness in a lot of that Korean New Age cinema that it feels so much part of that fabric that makes it so exciting and invigorating. There's a shagginess to them, which is part of how I was watching them. I was watching about them illegally. The graininess of a lot of them and that early digital era ties it back [to the themes]. A lot of filmmakers were learning the ropes, but they came to it with such confidence and skill with the craft.
I've compared New Korean Cinema to the New Hollywood era. I feel like you can find one-to-one comparisons with Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg with Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. And the fact that they're all friends, too, all coming up and building this new approach to the budding industry together. They revitalized the industry and turned everything on its head. It felt very much of that same ilk.
You have me thinking now: maybe Park Chan-wook is like their Brian De Palma?
Hmm, he does give De Palma! It's true.
The shagginess you talk about is interesting because it's especially noticeable in these directors' early work. But then you look at their more recent works, like Parasite for Bong Joon-ho or Decision to Leave for Park Chan-wook, where you're still seeing a lot of the same genre mixing and tonal boldness ... but it's done with even more confidence and precision. It has me thinking: Have they matured into a different style? Has the audience caught up to them? Are they less "in your face" after their enfant terrible, New Hollywood stage? Maybe that's why, finally now, it feels like they're getting their flowers.
I definitely think it might be both. I think that they've matured definitely as filmmakers, but I do think that audiences, especially in our more globalized society, have gotten more used to these different storytelling and filmmaking styles. At the time, it just felt so weird, new, and experimental. Now, it's something that you see a lot more of. But they're beyond just innovating for the sake of innovating now. They really have a mastery of this tonal juggling that they show in their most recent movies.
I think Decision to Leave (streaming on MUBI) is my favorite of Park Chan-wook's movies. I know that might be controversial because I know people really love The Handmaiden (streaming on Amazon Prime Video) and a lot of his other films, but I love Decision to Leave. I know it feels like his most accessible one, but I love how it feels like he was putting it all on the table in Decision to Leave. His love of these clinical frames where everything is this laid out and there for you to see, it's just so beautifully shot. There are so many Hitchcockian themes, too. Again, there's your De Palma [ed note: another noted Hitchcock devotee] comparison!
Hitchcock is a frequent touchstone for comparison to Park Chan-wook — do you think that’s a useful skeleton key? (A lot of the Vengeance Trilogy, especially Oldboy, is working with Hitch’s favorite plot device of the wrong man.)
Hitchcock is for a lot of people — and rightly so — the blueprint for suspense filmmaking. For all of his problems, I think that Hitchcock is considered the Master of Suspense for a reason. He innovated and set the standard for what you can do as a filmmaker to create, build, ratchet up, and hold that suspense. I can definitely see why Park Chan-wook cites him as an influence, and I can definitely see Hitchcock's influence throughout his films. It's that same meticulousness. He owes a lot to Hitchcock and has built upon him in a very interesting and exciting way.
You have suspense, which is characterized by restraint, on one end. And then in so many of his movies, especially Oldboy, there's also the extremity of an almost horror-adjacent sensibility. What do you make of the extremity (and borderline absurdity) of the films while also being very restrained and suspenseful?
I think that's largely the appeal of Oldboy and that Korean New Wave cinema. There's the extremity that comes from bursts of violence but also the restraint that it shows in other regards. That is very built into Korean history, that cycle of violence being tied to poverty and class violence. It's a way of acting out in what can be considered a repressed culture, one that is all about saving and putting on a face. The violence and extremes that you see in Oldboy [are] definitely a response to that, and maybe also a way of processing the years of trauma and historical damage and violence that has been done against them.
When you recommended Oldboy at /Film in your great Pop Culture Imports column, you wrote: “Korean auteur Park Chan-wook has mastered a particular brand of brutal sadism, and it's never been better on display than in his so-called Vengeance Trilogy.” Do you think he’s a sadist?
You know what, I wouldn't say that he's not a sadist. I don't want to go out and say that he is a sadist, but maybe he is!
The reason that I brought it up was because it made me realize I didn't think of him in that way. I think of him as being much more palatable than, say, his contemporaries in the New French Extremity. Those movies feel punishing and actively want the audience to suffer. I think Oldboy, and Park Chan-wook at large, use cruelty in the service of a larger thematic construct.
Oldboy, in a lot of ways, is a morality tale. It's not punishing for punishment’s sake. It's punishing for the sake of a better cause, if you look at their tradition.
Hasn't he referred to it as his Greek tragedy?
It's inspired by Oedipus. He accurately has described it as that.
I’m not going to drop an insane “women are not capable of appreciating GoodFellas”-level take, but I am curious how you feel about the evolving portrayal of female characters in his films. Oldboy in particular takes a lot of heat for having a female character with no agency who exists largely as a magnet for suffering, and a lot of his future films seem to be almost overcorrecting for that.
It doesn't surprise me, and I wouldn't lay all the blame on him. I would say that it's very much a part of the depictions of women that you see in Korean films at the time. I think that there's still a bit of a backward representation of women in Korean culture, even in K-dramas that are all glossy and have women as bleeds. I think a lot about how the movement of feminism in Korea is considered a big stigma, essentially. It's considered an extreme movement. For even a celebrity to say that they're a feminist would earn them lots and lots of hate. It got to the point that I think that there might be even some government action in relation to feminism ... it's pretty bad!
I would say that the depiction of women isn't great in earlier Park Chan-wook movies because maybe it was not great for women in general in Korea at the time. I'm sure it's improved over the years because it's reflected culturally in what was happening in Korea at the time, which is women are getting more rights and more agency in real life. It also feels very much like the early aughts, too. Oldboy is based on Japanese manga, so the original depiction of this specific young girl that the protagonist gets into a relationship with is even more demure. She was very much just a pawn in the whole scheme of things and considered a wallflower type in a way. I don't know if I would go out to defend Park Chan-wook because I don't really know much about his own gender politics, either.
His humor can be hard to pick up on if you’re watching at home — how do you make heads or tails of when he's playing a moment for comedy?
It's true, his humor plays a lot better in a group than it does when you're watching it alone. You really just feel the violence and brutality weighing on you when you're watching it alone. You miss a lot of the humor. There's dry humor in a lot of his movies, even Oldboy, which is considered a very heavy and horrific movie. People often overlook the dry humor in his films, which is very much part of the fabric of his films. They shouldn't!
More recently, his more “seriously” regarded movies like The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave were very funny.
Decision to Leave is hilarious! Oh my gosh, do you remember the scene when he's texting her but he waiting for those text bubbles? His smile just drops as it goes longer. It's great! Hilarious.
Make the case for Thirst, which comes from a period in Park Chan-wook's filmography that most people don't hold in particularly high regard. Why should people check that one out?
It's this dark, twisty, twisted, and erotic vampire thriller that I think shows Park Chan-wook at his most romantic before we get to The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave (which I think is his most romantic). It's this weird little vampire movie that has snuck under the radar, and it's such a great mix of erotic thriller and class commentary at the same time. Also, the religious repression. I think it's the fun of seeing the sexy vampire priest played by Song Kang-ho (best known for his work as the Kim family patriarch in Parasite), who is excellent in this movie. I was very surprised to see Song Kang-ho play such a different type than I'd seen him before. He plays a sexy baby.
Any other final thoughts? What have you found valuable for someone if they wanted to dive into Park Chan-wook?
Even after maturing into the filmmaker he is today, he is still so transgressive and radical in many different ways. I think people often look to him those those brutal twists and scares, but I think that he is much more interesting, complex, and layered than just an extreme director.
Thanks to Hoai-Tran for her time and thoughts! Hope you find them valuable as you explore Park Chan-wook. Back next week with a fall festival season kickoff.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall