Description


 Director Park Chan-wook's "Old Boy" has won the grand prize, the second-place honor at the 57th Cannes Film Festival which was held from May 12 for a 12-day run. "Old Boy" is the first Korean film to win the Cannes' Grand Prix, this year given by a nine-member jury headed by American director Quentin Tarantino. Based on a Japanese comic book series of the same title, "Old Boy" revolves around an ordinary, alcohol-loving man named O Daesu (played by Choe Minsik) who has been kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years without ever knowing why. Given no explanation for his incarceration for the alleged murder of his wife, O spends the next 15 years alone undergoing hallucinatory episodes, with a television set as his sole company. As expected, O seeks revenge until he meets a strong enemy (Yu Jitae). The first half the movie centering around the cell scene is reminiscent of Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" where Gregor Samsa is one day transformed into a giant insect. What makes "Oldboy" different from other usual "revenge" films is that it persistently pursues and asks viewers a single question of "why he has been confined for 15 years," as opposed to "who has imprisoned him." This film had already made a great success in the Korean film market attracting 3,300,000 filmgoers when it was shown here last November. "Old Boy" is Park's second film to compete at an international film festival after "Joint Security Area: JSA" at the Berlin International Film Festival 2000 where the film failed to win an award. It has also garnered three awards including the best director and the best actor prizes in the 24th Blue Dragon Film Awards held last December.


 

 * O Dae-su is an ordinary salary man with a wife and daughter who likes his drinks and to talk with his friends. His motto is “to get by day by day.” One night, he is kidnapped on his way home and thrown in a privately run prison. The prison looks like a cheap hotel room. All he has as his menu is fried dumplings, and all he can do in the tiny cell is watch TV. After about a year, he learns that his wife has been murdered and that he is the primary suspect. He tries suicide, but even this is not to be had. Vowing to take his revenge, he starts training his mind and body. Meanwhile, in an attempt to guess who could be responsible for keeping him in this cell, he begins to write a “Bibliography of Evil Deeds” trying to remember everything bad he had ever done in his life. He also starts digging a whole in the wall with steel chopsticks. Fifteen years passed by and just when the hole had gotten big enough to let him through, he finds he has been released and abandoned at the very spot that he was first kidnapped. He stops by a Japanese restaurant and he blacks out. Mi-do, the assistant cook at the restaurant takes him to her flat. Mi-do’s sympathy for Dae-su slowly changes to affection. Meanwhile, Dae-su finds out about the 7.5 storey prison through a receipt he had found in the fried dumplings, which had ‘Cheongryong(blue dragon)’ written on it. On the day of their first encounter, Wu-jin makes a proposal to Dae-su that if he were to find out why he had imprisoned him within 5 days, he would kill himself. Dae-su, in order not to lose his love Mi-do, and to uncover the vicious secret, must race with time to solve this puzzle. Just who was Lee Wu-jin, and why had he imprisoned Dae-su for 15 years? What will happen to the two when the secret is revealed?