Oasis

 

Writer/director Lee Chang-dong

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OASIS (Oasiseu)                    A-                                                                                               South Korea  (132 mi)  2002  d:  Lee Chang-dong

This is a wild adventure, bold and brutally raw, yet also unusually innovative and psychologically intriguing, a wretchedly close-up look at societal prejudice through one of the most improbable and disturbing love affairs ever captured on film, which is also heartbreaking, as there are small, intimate moments that will simply take your breath away.  Assuredly directed, evenly paced, using a whole arsenal of camera techniques, the film features two outstanding lead performances that couldn’t be more difficult for the audience to watch, each exposed through different opening segments.  Hong Jong-du, in a simply dazzling performance by Sol Kyung-qu, makes the impossible become possible, as his completely unlikable manner later becomes endearing to the audience.  He roams the streets in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt while everyone else is wearing winter clothes, smiling, affable, completely at ease with himself, though his body is a neverending series of nervous energy where he can’t stop himself from constantly wiping his nose throughout the film.  Others find him so repulsive that they think of calling the cops the moment they see him.  In American films, the seedy character of Ratso Rizzo from MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) comes to mind, but this character hasn’t half his brains.  The man defies convention, lurching into action the moment anything comes to mind, operating completely by instinct, his body a constant stream of twitching motion, never sitting still, so out of control on the edge of society that there’s no one else out there with him.  Recently released from prison, perhaps mildly retarded, certainly behaviorally challenged, his family has moved and changed phone numbers, perhaps hoping they never see him again, leaving him hanging in the wind trying to survive on nothing.  But when the police arrest him for failing to pay for meals, his family resumes the position of bailing him out of trouble, seemingly a neverending task.  

Out of the blue and apparently without any thought to what would happen, Jong-du decides to pay his respects by bringing a fruit basket to the family whose father he was convicted of killing in the hit and run accident that led to his incarceration.  Outraged at the thought of seeing him again, they find his presence disgusting, but no more disgusting than what we soon discover they are planning to do, which is leave their seriously disabled daughter with an advanced stage of cerebral palsy, Han Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), alone to fend for herself in a rathole of an apartment while the rest of the family moves into a brand new spacious residence that was built to accommodate the needs of the disabled.  Gong-ju in a wheelchair is a sorry sight from the moment we see her, as her physical contortions are profoundly disturbing and awkwardly off-putting, her eyes moving around her unsteady head which itself has no muscle control, with stunted growth on her hands and feet, unable to walk and barely able on occasion to blurt out a few nearly unrecognizable words.  Adding to the wretchedness of this situation, Jong-du returns later to find Gong-ju alone and sexually assaults her to her hysterical cries and shrieks, only deterred when she faints, where he then actually takes the time to make sure she recovers.  With this brief moment of concern, our revulsion turns to amazement as an oddball friendship ensues. 

In what could only be described as remarkable, the audience is immediately intrigued by Gong-ju’s use of a hand mirror, continually glaring it in Jong-du’s face, where the light reflections break up into surrealistic images of little butterflies.  Earlier, to the sounds of her singing a soft melody, we saw light rays in her room turn into a slow motion rendering of a white dove fluttering around her apartment.  These visions are sparingly used, but quite effective, as on occasion Gong-ju actually becomes the woman she envisions, completely healthy without any physical deformities, but still glaringly in tune with her partner.  When they meet, Jong-du tells her that her name in Korean means “princess,” which he affectionately calls her after that, claiming he was named after a famous general, the nickname she uses for him, but only after pointing out that the famous general he was referring to was actually a notorious traitor.  Meanwhile, Jong-du becomes her only friend, seemingly the only one who talks to her, even calling her on the phone, sharing noodles together, doing her laundry, washing her hair, and is certainly the only one whoever takes her outdoors from her imprisoned environment.  In the real world, however, no one sees her as a person, instead she is simply a deformed creature that people have learned to stay away from.  When Jong-du brings her to his mother’s family birthday party at an upscale local restaurant, the family is immediately repulsed at the sight of her and no one except Jong-du ever offers to help her.  After both being roundly rejected at the restaurant, Jong-du doesn’t want to go home but wants to make a special night of it, taking her to a karaoke lounge where he holds nothing back, screeching at the top of his lungs while singing her a beautiful love song. 

From the long opening shot which focuses on an Indian tapestry hanging on the wall, like an exotic magic carpet showing a beautiful princess along with a young servant and an elephant at a water hole next to a giant palm tree, this film does an excellent job creating the fragile interior world of the lead characters, using music and eloquent fantasy sequences as brilliant contrasts from the blunt trauma of an uncaring exterior world that is a near documentary depiction of lower class deprivation.  As the film progresses, we learn how the families have turned their backs on both of these individuals in such a morally reprehensible manner that it’s as if society is tilted upside down, where the outside world is nothing but arrogance and self-serving class interests that blames or pushes aside anyone that stands in their way, making both of these hapless individuals easy family scapegoats.  Without ever mentioning it, both understand the degree of their social ostracization where there has never been anyone else who actually took the time for either one of them.  Over time, as the views of society prevail, this couple is but a faint glitch on a radar screen, thoroughly bulldozed by the larger societal interests and savagely misunderstood, where the realist world continues to have their own way of seeing things.  One can’t help but be utterly flabbergasted at what is achieved by the end of the film, where despite their wrenchingly sad predicament, there is something profoundly upbeat and emotionally cathartic about what we’ve experienced here, using vibrant exit music that has a Latin jazz tinge of what we might hear from Wong Kar-wai, leading to a tremendous climax that only dissolves afterwards over the end credits.  The exquisite music is attributed to Lee Jae-jin.  Moon So-ri’s painstaking detail in expressing her physical deformity is nothing less than phenomenal, apparently realized by living in a house of cerebral palsy residents for several months prior to the shoot, which certainly adds a spectacular layer of realism to the sheer look of this film, never for a moment overshadowing the equally stunning physical mannerisms of Sol Kyung-qu. 

Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang)

Writer/director Lee Chang-dong

 

PEPPERMINT CANDY (Bakha satang)       B+                                                                       South Korea  Japan  (129 mi)  2000  d:  Lee Chang-dong

One of the early films that put South Korean cinema on the map, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, and Best New Actor prizes in the Grand Bell Awards, the Korean version of their Academy Awards, drawing international attention at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, while drawing attention to writer/director and novelist Lee Chang-dong, who would become the Korean Cultural Minister from 2003 to 2004.  What’s remarkable about this epic and emotionally wrenching film is its backwards chronology that parallels twenty years of turbulent South Korean history, viewed through a single character, Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), whose troubled life retreats backwards into more innocent times, yet he’s psychologically scarred by traumatic events coming early in his life, becoming an exaggerated and emotionally hysterical melodrama that features a clearly unsympathetic central figure, yet the overall epic style is captivating.  Much like Hou Hsiou-hsien’s A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), which opened new doors of Taiwanese democracy in a nation that had been under strict martial law for forty years, the key to this film is returning back to 1980 when two events reawakened the public conscience and altered the course of South Korean history.  The first occurred on October 26, 1979 when President Park Chung Hee, after almost twenty years of tyrannical rule, was assassinated by the head of his own intelligence team after ordering murderous attacks on Korean citizens who were protesting the unabated continuation of martial law, The Park Chung Hee Regime in South Korea, while the second event occurred just a few months later known as the Gwangju massacre, one of the most horrific events in Korean history, yet also one of the turning points from dictatorship to democracy, where unspeakable atrocities were committed by the military, reportedly claiming the lives of more than 2000 citizens, including bayonetting students, raping and dismembering women, while using flamethrowers against protesting students, a horrendous, catastrophic event that was largely suppressed, receiving little media attention, with the government reporting the incident was initiated by treasonous North Korean spies and leftist infiltrators.  As a result, the incident would linger for several decades, eventually leading to a pro-democracy movement that would finally prevail by the end of the century against a weakened military dictatorship, opening the doors to democracy and a prosperous middle class when this film was made.  This background information is essential in understanding the traumatic trajectory of a relative innocent who goes astray, easily becoming part of his corrupt surroundings, growing psychologically damaged by what he witnesses and experiences, where this uncompromising film, which remains the director’s most overtly political drama, offers a road map into the nation’s moral vacuum and lack of conscience, playing out in a tense, fictionalized scenario that is graphically disturbing and eerily chilling. 

One of the key criticisms of the film is the total focus on toxic masculinity at the expense of more broadened female character development, which the director has taken to heart and corrected with many of his later, more mature works.  But here Yong-so reveals narcissistic and obsessive tendencies, languishing in a misogynistic self-pity while accentuating his failures throughout his life, lamenting what he’s been forced to endure, becoming himself a reprehensible and utterly loathsome human being.  From a literary perspective, this sounds very much like the guilty conscience of a wretchedly miserable Dostoyevsky character, whose personal transgressions haunt him for the rest of his life, affecting every aspect of his daily life, perhaps best expressed in the acutely examined psychological study in Crime and Punishment.  Yong-so feels like a criminal, an outcast no longer worth living, showing disturbing suicidal tendencies at the outset of the film, absurdly joining the 20th reunion picnic of his old student group that is already in progress, having started without him, yet while he’s welcomed and embraced, he appears deranged, awkwardly sending all the wrong messages, inadvertently bumping into people, singing offensibly loud and horribly off-key karaoke, culminating with a primal scream that just draws looks of helpless confusion, where he’s simply out of kilter with the group, as if on the wrong speed, not even remotely fitting in.  So he stumbles out into the shallow river, pretty much making a fool out of himself, before climbing the railroad trestles and standing on the tracks awaiting a train, where his mindset appears to be a death wish.  While others show their concern and warn him to come down, especially with the sudden arrival of a train, but he ignores their pleas, grotesquely setting the tone for what follows.  The introductory credit sequence is deserving of mention, as there’s a tiny blip in the center of the screen that grows larger and larger, eventually becoming a recognizable train tunnel as we watch a train passing from complete darkness into the alluring bright light of the opening.  Without knowing it at the time, that opening marks the scene of the crime.  Train track interludes with a pleasant musical theme also mark the transition between time periods, curiously shot from the back of the train and then run backwards, so traces of smoke or people walking and riding bikes adjacent to the tracks are seen moving backwards, offering a surreal twist, each segment marked with a chapter title identifying the time and place, revealing seven different episodes beginning in 1999 and ending in 1979, each shedding light on Yong-so’s personal history while also offering comment on the formation of a national identity, subverting the idea of development, as if in a perpetual state of evolving.  By always moving backwards, viewers are retreating back to the original source of the trauma, with an emphasis on what went terribly wrong in the man’s life, his mandatory military service leading to his involvement in the massacre, his failed business decisions and doomed career choices, his disastrous marriage to Hong-ja (Kim Yeo-jin), or his broken relationship with his first love, Sun-im (Moon So-ri).

One interesting aspect of this picture is the attempt to bring to life historical issues that have been obscured by political repression, using one man as a kind of Biblical Job figure, as he is tried and tested throughout, finding disaster both behind and ahead of him, enduring overwhelming challenges, none particularly successfully, yet his ordeal humanizes the viewer’s relationship with history, offering a rare insight into such troubled times.  Even today, there are unanswered questions about the Gwangju massacre, yet this film, and several others as well, has helped the younger generation become more knowledgeable about the history that changed South Korea into what it is today.  Yong-ho represents a kind of ordinary everyman who can’t forget the past trauma as it continues to affect his life, angry at himself and at the world, using violence as a way to forget, thinking it will help him heal, becoming a policeman, for instance, yet ends up pressured by his peers to go overboard, routinely brutalizing subjects with torture techniques, becoming psychologically distanced from his own humanity.  When he discovers his wife has cheated on him, he kicks and beats her mercilessly, exposing the fact Korea is a patriarchal society with a long history of domestic violence against women.  Violence, in fact, has become synonymous with South Korean cinema, with Park Chan-wook, a former film critic, and his Vengeance Trilogy becoming one of the most notoriously acclaimed purveyors of torture porn, where his immaculate framing exposes grotesque and graphically barbaric subject matter.  The more understated Lee Chang-dong has gone in a different direction, where his films are more novelesque, driven by subtlety and extremely detailed character studies, offering a more poetic view of cinema, becoming a kind of poet laureate for his country.  Ostensibly a morality tale, he somehow mixes hope with pessimism, inspired by the typically Korean notion of Han.  It’s worth noting that Yong-ho was lulled into a false sense of security, as his plan that violence would help him forget is doomed from the outset, becoming a total failure, leading only to further depression and suicidal thoughts, believing his life is worthless and meaningless.  His sins stand for the sins of the nation, for which there is no antidote.  It’s also curious how the one character that follows him in nearly every episode is Sun-im, the girl he tries so hard to forget, reminding him of his younger days of innocence.  We see her in various stages of her life as well, suggesting her memory continues to haunt him, always longing to be with the one you love, often indistinguishable between reality and a dream, even finding a girl in a bar who pretends to be her.  We’re privy to his own crudeness when he personally rejects her, intentionally groping another woman in front of her, thoroughly humiliating her.  We are reminded of an interrogation scene that turns gruesome, when a prisoner defecates all over himself, with Yong-ho furiously scrubbing his hands afterwards, but a fellow officer amusingly reminds him that smell is very difficult to get rid of, suggesting some memories are extremely difficult to wash away.  The film suggests our lives are forever connected to history, where all attempts to forget about the past only lead to further despair.  The naïve innocence of the final segment is positively stunning in its tenderness, seemingly disconnected to everything that came before, where Yong-ho is simply a different person, a wide-eyed student filled with aspirations and dreams, which are quickly altered by the savage inhumanity he faces.