Oldboy (2003)

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Movie
German title Oldboy
Original title Oldboy ( 올드 보이 )
Country of production South Korea
original language Korean
Publishing year 2003
length 120 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Park Chan-wook
script Hwang Jo-yoon
Park Chan-wook
production Kim Dong-joo
music Cho Young-wuk
camera Chung Chung-hoon
cut Kim Sang-beom
occupation
chronology

←  Predecessor
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Successor  →
Lady Vengeance

Oldboy is a 2003 South Korean film directed by Park Chan-wook . The story is loosely based on the manga Old Boy by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi. The film is by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and before Lady Vengeance , the second part of a revenge - trilogy .

In 2004 he received the Film Festival in Cannes the Grand Jury Prize and is considered one of the most influential films of contemporary South Korean cinema .

action

Oh Dae-su is a businessman, but not a particularly good family man. When he had to be picked up from a police station, drunk and drunk, on the evening of his daughter's fourth birthday, he was kidnapped by strangers and locked in a room for 15 years. His only contact with the outside world is the television. He learned from a news program that his wife was murdered in cold blood and that he is believed to be responsible for the murder.

In order to keep his sanity in isolation, Oh Dae-su begins to keep a diary and makes a list of people who might hate him so much that they would be willing to punish him in this way. He channels his anger into hard training, which includes hitting the wall with his fists until a thick cornea surrounds his joints.

When he finds a third metal chopstick while he is eating, which is always made of dumplings , which apparently was accidentally put down for him, he begins to use it to remove the mortar from the wall and to laboriously scratch his way into freedom. But just as he can hold his hand in the fresh air for the first time, he is numb and wakes up not far from the place where he was kidnapped. He tests his fighting skills on a group of young thugs. His kidnappers send him a mobile phone, a new suit, a wallet full of money and his diaries through a beggar.

Dae-su visits a sushi bar owned by a young woman named Mi-do who takes him in out of pity. Both feel drawn to each other. He searches for his daughter, but when he learns that she is supposed to have been adopted by a Swedish couple, he gives up the search.

He tries to find the place of his captivity. Since he can remember exactly the taste of the dumplings from his prison, he visits numerous restaurants to try their dumplings. Finally he finds a remote restaurant where these dumplings are prepared. He pursues the messenger from the restaurant and thus arrives at a private prison where other people can be held prisoner for money. There he overpowers a guard and tortures him by pulling out fifteen teeth one at a time - one for each year of his imprisonment. The guard doesn't know who initiated the detention, but the reason he gives is "Dae-su talks too much".

To Dae-su's surprise, the wealthy Lee Woo-jin contacted him the next day, and revealed that he was responsible for his imprisonment. He asks Dae-su to find the reason for this punishment within five days, otherwise Mi-do will die. But if he succeeds, Woo-jin will kill himself. In the evening, Mi-do sees himself ready for Dae-su and lets him deflower.

With Mi-do's help, Dae-su follows a trail that leads him to his old school, which he attended with Woo-jin. Here Dae-su remembers a scandal that he had triggered back then - he happened to watch Woo-jin and his sister making love and passed it on. After moving, it was rumored that Woo-jin had impregnated his own sister and that Woo-jin's sister committed suicide.

With this information, Dae-su goes to Woo-jin. Since he is convinced that he has found out the reason for his detention, Woo-jin has to stick to the bargain and kill himself. Woo-jin, however, reveals to him that Mi-do is Dae-su's daughter, whom Woo-jin adopted after Dae-su's kidnapping. Through skillful manipulation and hypnosis , Woo-jin succeeded in bringing father and daughter into an incestuous relationship so that Dae-su had the same terrible incest experiences as he himself had to go through back then.

Dae-su is devastated and begs Woo-jin for forgiveness and not to clarify Mi-do about the true relationships. In order not to “talk too much” himself, he cuts off his own tongue. Woo-jin leaves him in this state. Since he has now avenged his sister and thus the only goal of his life has been achieved, he commits suicide.

In the epilogue , Dae-su lets himself be hypnotized in a wintry landscape in order to forget his past. His personality is split into a “monster” who can remember everything, and the “normal” Dae-su. The monster turns away from him under hypnosis and disappears. After this session, Mi-do finds him. She tells him that she loves him. Dae-Su laughs, but his laugh changes to a grimace twisted in pain.

Trivia

  • At the first encounter between Dae-su and Mi-do in the sushi bar, Choi Min-sik as Dae-su eats a living octopus . According to the director, four of the animals lost their lives for it. These are considered a delicacy in Korea, but are served cut. When the film won the Cannes Prize, Park Chan-wook thanked the Kraken as well as the cast. Choi Min-sik is a vegetarian.
  • The winter landscape of the epilogue was filmed in New Zealand .
  • The soundtrack contains the first movement of the violin concerto The Winter from The Four Seasons , composed by Antonio Vivaldi (1725). The music accompanies the torture scene and is intended to take away the viewer's disgust by creating a contrast between the images and the music.
  • Dae-su's actor Choi Min-sik improvised a large part of his dialogue during the confrontation with Woo-jin, including his old school anthem.
  • Computer-generated visual effects were used, among other things, for the ants that come out of Dae-su's arm and those who then crawl over Dae-su, as well as in the corridor fight scene - when a knife is stuck in Dae-su's back.
  • An Indian film was released in 2005 under the title Zinda , which Oldboy is accused of plagiarism .
  • An American remake of the same title was made in 2013, directed by Spike Lee . In supporting roles are u. a. Josh Brolin , Elizabeth Olsen and Samuel L. Jackson seen. In contrast to the original, the film received mostly moderate reviews and flopped at the box office.

reception

Oldboy had 3.27 million moviegoers in South Korea. Oldboy was largely critically acclaimed. On Rotten Tomatoes , 120 out of a total of 147 reviews are positive, which corresponds to a rating of 82%. In summary, the film on the website is described as a "strange, powerful tale of revenge". On Metacritic , Oldboy scores a metascore of 77/100 based on 32 reviews.

“Just as brutal as complex thriller, whose scenes of violence testify to selected cruelty and which, together with the strongly compressed plot full of breaks and holes, serve to manipulate the viewer on all levels, especially emotionally. The deeply skeptical meditation on a high level in cinematic language ponders in a radical way about revenge and suicide as extreme alternative courses of action, but overall it cannot break the spell of fatalism. "

- Lexicon of international film

“The unbelievably brutal, yet lyrical manga adaptation by Chan-wook Park is the middle part of a virtuoso, complex revenge trilogy that began in 2002 with 'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance' and ended in 2005 with 'Lady Vengeance'. For this there was the Grand Prize of the Jury in Cannes. Conclusion: crazy, absolutely disturbing violent opera. "

- Cinema

“ Oldboy is a milestone, not just in Asian cinema, but in cinema itself. You can't get out of your amazement with this film. Park Chan-Wook plays in a league with David Fincher, Takeshi Kitano or Quentin Tarantino. "

- Süddeutsche Zeitung

“You can't experience more lively cinema than 'Oldboy'. And that with a completely ludicrous, nightmarish story that is about retribution, anguish, self-mutilation, incest, suicide and damnation. "

- The mirror

Awards

In 2016, Oldboy ranked 30th in a BBC poll of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .

Web links

Wikiquote: Oldboy  Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Oldboy . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , August 2004 (PDF; test number: 99 135 K).
  2. ↑ a b Oldboy - Trivia
  3. ↑ Oldboy - Filming Locations
  4. ↑ Oldboy at Rotten Tomatoes (English)Template: Rotten Tomatoes / Maintenance / Various connoisseurs in Wikipedia and Wikidata
  5. ↑ Oldboy (2013) - box office results on boxofficemojo.com
  6. ↑ 올드 보이. In: Cine21. Retrieved September 4, 2016 (Korean).
  7. ↑ Oldboy at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
  8. ↑ Oldboy at Metacritic (English)
  9. ↑ Oldboy. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  10. ↑ Criticism on Cinema.de
  11. ↑ a b Reviews of Oldboy on 3l-homevideo.de