The Oldboy Effect

Just as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction gave rise to a slew of PoMo indie action-comedies with characters dropping pop-culture references every four minutes, there are now South Korean directors doing their damnedest to duplicate what Park Chan-wook did last year with Oldboy, the powerful, stylish neo-noir that appealed both to art house crowds (it won the Grand Prix at Cannes) as well as the average moviegoer. The first contender is A Bittersweet Life, a film that very badly wants to be deemed "this year's Oldboy". The success of Oldboy cannot be reduced to a single element. It's that rarest of things -- a film where everything falls perfectly into place -- the acting, writing, directing, design, music, etc. Kim Ji-woon, no stranger himself to highly-stylized production design (the wonderful The Quiet Family and the pretty-good A Tale of Two Sisters) tries a bit too hard to inject some of that Park Chan-wook magic into A Bittersweet Life, but no visual or audible trickery can hide the fact that the film is little more than a well made but tiresomely familiar violent gangster flick. Lee Byung-hun plays Sun-woo, an impeccably dressed gangster who appreciates the finer things in life, yet is an emotional shut-in. Fitted in an expensive tailor-made suit, he can calmly enjoy a delicate chocolate soufflé and moments later dish out a beating to some young thugs who are disrespecting the bar in the hotel he manages. A dedicated servant to Boss Kang, Sun-woo finds himself in the somewhat hackneyed position of being charged with looking after his boss's young mistress, Hee-soo (Shin Min-a), with orders to kill her if she is unfaithful. Though the "falling for the boss's girl" device has been around since Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), Kim does manage to put a somewhat unique spin on it, but it's not enough to elevate the film from standard gangster-noir fare. The emotionally closeted gangster who discovers he has a heart after all is itself a character we've seen countless times before, and there's nothing particularly original or interesting about Sun-woo to make us care all that much -- there's hardly a trace of complexity about him. The violent scenes (of which there are many) strive to outdo themselves in creativity, and Kim seems interested in coming up with new and unique ways to kill a man (including the scraping of a head against a concrete wall). Sun-woo is virtually unstoppable -- whether a knife in the gut or a bullet in the head, they're all merely flesh wounds for our tragic hero. Unfortunately, the scenes that find Sun-woo battling a mob of thugs are lacking the comic (or even absurd) nature of the epic hammer fight scene in Oldboy (not to mention the stunning choreography), and what we are left with is a generic one-against-the-multitude fight scene. The Oldboy influence on A Bittersweet Life is undeniable. Besides a few common cast members, Kim hired Ryu Seong-hie, the art director on Oldboy to act as production designer, and though there are some sequences that are reminiscent of Park's film, the overall look of A Bittersweet Life lacks the exaggerated sense of unreality Ryu created for Oldboy. In fact, the level of detail found in Kim's earlier films (think of the house in A Tale of Two Sisters) just isn't present here. The soundtrack, at times, takes its cue from Oldboy, including a sweeping waltz that plays during the film's climactic moment. (Though unlike Oldboy, the waltz isn't an integral part of the story.) Then there is the strangest link of all between the two -- the nemesis in both films wears a floppy Gilligan hat. Go figure. A Bittersweet Life isn't a bad film at all, but it does pour on the drama a bit thick. Sun-woo just isn't an interesting enough character, yet the film attempts to evoke a sense of pathos. Whereas the tragedy in Oldboy was almost operatic, Sun-woo is more a victim of circumstance, rather than an individual cast into a hell of his own making. Though repeated viewings have revealed some details missed the first time round, A Bittersweet Life still leaves Filmbrain feeling cold -- there's simply nothing to latch on to.