Thunder out of Korea

Anguished, beautiful and desperately alive, "Oldboy" is a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Mar 25, 2005 | Now that pop culture is virtually the only culture many of us live with from day to day, is it possible that, like human beings deprived of sunlight or vitamin C for too long, we've come to crave classic themes anywhere we can get them? I'm not just talking about people who warmed to Hardy, Melville, James and Euripedes in school and now lead workaday lives with little time to read, or those who would love to buy opera tickets regularly but can't afford to. I'm talking about anyone who ever bothers to set foot in a movie theater, or even just turns on the TV. On television, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" used young-adult school and dating problems as an excuse for trawling the wider territory of redemption, guilt and universal moral responsibility. And at the movies, "Kill Bill Vol. 2" (less so than "Vol. 1"), framed as a typical revenge story, was actually a complex meditation on the high price of maintaining dignity in the face of humiliation.

"Kill Bill Vol. 2" didn't do well with audiences, and although "Buffy" had a fiercely passionate following, it wasn't exactly a ratings buster. But the fact that these stories keep forcing their way into the culture at all, like stubborn crocuses refusing to buy into the mere concept of winter, suggests that we need more ways of interpreting the polychromatic strata of human emotion than "American Idol" and "America's Next Top Model" can give us. Even the fact that comic books, many of them based on ancient dramatic tropes, keep getting made into movies (albeit often lame ones) tells us something is missing in our diet -- something that books, music and theater gave earlier generations even before the invention of moving pictures.

Could this explain why more Westerners are finally paying attention to Asian filmmaking? While big-budget American pictures have sorely fallen down on the job of giving audiences the rich dramatic textures they yearn for, in the past few years Asian cinema has given us pictures like Zhang Yimou's "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," and even cop movies like Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's "Infernal Affairs," all of which found favor with savvy audiences. (Hollywood, apparently hoping to duplicate magic on a Xerox machine, is remaking "Infernal Affairs" with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio. The director is Martin Scorsese.)

Park Chanwook's "Oldboy," from Korea, is quite different from the above-mentioned pictures, not least because of the intensely graphic nature of its suggested violence. And perhaps even more than those pictures do, "Oldboy" makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.

Next Page: Like a flower watered with blood

• View blog reactions