Cinema Palace : No other choice

Cinema Palace : No other choice

01/03 @ 15h10

A sensational state-of-the-nation satire from Park Chan-wook

An unemployed paper worker hatches a cunning plan to murder his way back into the job market in this continually surprising black comedy from the director of The Handmaiden and Oldboy.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions. It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis, and the state of the nation itself. It is based on Donald E Westlake’s satirical horror-thriller The Ax from 1997, previously filmed in 2005 by Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated. It may not be Park’s masterpiece but it is the best film in the Venice competition so far.

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At first, this film looks like a serial-killer comedy in the style of Kind Hearts and Coronets, or a salaryman-shame nightmare in the vein of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out and Nicole Garcia’s The Adversary. But in fact Park refuses our expectations: Man-su does not work through his victim-base as we might imagine. In fact, he stalls early on. Other narrative priorities come to the surface. We discover that the house, which he is in danger of losing due to mortgage default, was his childhood home, and the site of a profound trauma connected to his father, a pig farmer. (One of his victims gets trussed up as compactly as a pig: an unforgettably nasty image.) So all this might be only tangentially connected to his sacking.

Cinema Palace
Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian

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