South Korea, 1988. Oh Dae-su is a person normal (whatever that means), fully integrated into society. She leads a quiet life, gray, very quiet too: he has a wife, a daughter of four years and an old friend who pulls him out of trouble when he raises a little 'elbow (yes, sometimes it happens). The film begins: our Dae-su has actually had a few too many to drink and freaks out in a police station, but it's nothing serious. Spoke his friend Joo-hwan who drags him out of there and together reach a phone booth Dae-su and reassuring the worried wife. He wants to return home, he also bought a present for his daughter. Outside the cabin it rains, Dae-su goes out and leaves Joo-hwan staggered into the cabin to talk to his wife. 1988, telephone booth, rain, end of everything. You see a purple umbrella and Dae-su vanishes.
South Korea, 2003. Fifteen years have passed and Oh Dae-su is no longer a normal person. Fifteen years have many, many, may seem eternal, but if you are forced to pass them locked in a room without knowing why, without being able to go out alone with an old television set, four walls and a faux landscape in the window. Fifteen years of emptiness, madness, despair. Fifteen years of anguish and anger fierce. Clenched fists and kicks against the wall, fried ravioli every single day, hallucinations, ants do not exist under the skin, someone who all the drug nights and the despair of not knowing, not understanding. The desire for revenge that day after day, year after year, it grows and grows until it becomes the only reason to stay alive. Then the freedom and the bad dream that turns into a surreal nightmare, a whirlwind of events impossible to control. Severed hands, octopus eaten alive, phones ringing, fighting with a hammer, unknown women, blood and teeth ripped, suicidal dogs, a dagger stuck in his back, blackmail, ultimatums and chat colors. The desire to understand who you become, what you've become and why. "Although it is worse than a beast, I also do not have the right to live?". Anger and revenge are intertwined with fear, love, sex, buried memories. The answer comes, the truth emerges, vengeance is about to be eaten ... but Dae-su can not be just a pawn unconscious inside a maze game. Another truth, terrible and unbearable, is waiting for him in a colored box.
Old Boy (Oldboy or ) the second film by Korean director Chan-wook Park - loosely based on the eponymous Japanese manga - is a film visually perfect. The lights, mounting and framing change with the changing of history and fit perfectly in a complicated interlocking mechanism, made up of flashbacks, subplots, twists and sudden changes of register. A long fight, very realistic, is shot as if it were a scene from a '80s video game action, the hero seems to chase the past self in a beautiful alternate assembly that tells the re-emergence of his memories, some scenes were filmed with the camera fixed and aseptically documenting moments of unprecedented violence, others will follow the evolution in paroxysmal and smugly ironic. There is one scene the same, in Old Boy. It seems to pass from film to film, all the time. Oldboy is violent, hyperbolic, delirious over the top, but also a profound film that tells a tragic story and deals with universal themes and very strong as the feeling of revenge, hope, redemption, the failure, remorse, madness . At times the audience seems to be in a in a modern reworking of Shakespeare's plays four or five put together. The plays of Shakespeare are mixed then the topoi of classical Greek tragedies, violence adds to the disturbing and slapstick by turns suddenly tragic lyricism in black-humor comedy. All reinterpreted in manga through the eyes of a visionary director. The result is not simply sum of the parts, however, and the various components are not stacked on each other just to wink at the viewer (as it does, so perfect, Tarantino). In Old Boy all these mechanisms converge and come together in perfect unity. One unit terrible and deafening at the end of the film remains in the viewer's eyes and slowly creeps into his mind, forcing him to return to those images too absurd to be true, yet absurdly true. Not to be missed.
