Park Chan-wook

Indie New Year: No Other Choice, We Bury the Dead, The Plague

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice; Daisy Ridley in We Bury the Dead; Everett Blunck in The Plague

Christmas tends to be a big holiday for new movies, but New Year’s Day, not so much. Major studios rarely drop new films in the chill of early January, so the flip of the calendar instead becomes an opportunity for limited releases to expand slowly (sometimes glacially—looking at you, The Testament of Ann Lee). Today, we’re catching up with three independent pictures gradually making their way around the country, though viewers in some markets may be forced to wait until they hit streaming. This is why I support a national law requiring all movies to play in all theaters at all times.

No Other Choice. Capitalism is murder. You work and you work, pouring your blood and sweat into a numbing career that drains the life from you, in service of unfeeling bosses who can sack you whenever they want. (Note to any of my superiors who happen to be reading this piece: I love you and I love my job, please don’t fire me.) If you’re a CEO, they send you packing with a golden parachute. If you’re a line worker, they give you an eel. Read More

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Decision to Leave: Should He Stray or Should She Go?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tang Wei and Park Hae-il in Decision to Leave

He’s a good cop: smart, confident, decisive. He’s looking down at a fresh corpse on a coroner’s table, asking the right questions, making the proper deductions. But when the woman enters the room, he glances up from the body, and for a split second his breath catches in his throat, and his typically impassive countenance is replaced with astonishment. He recovers his poise quickly enough—after all, he’s a professional—but that single skipped beat of his heart foreshadows a future of desire and ruin. He isn’t in control anymore; she is.

This is an early scene from Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, but it’s also the latest descendant in a long lineage of Meaningful Looks; it’s Fred MacMurray eyeing Barbara Stanwyck’s bare shoulders in Double Indemnity, and Jimmy Stewart staring across a restaurant at Kim Novak in Vertigo, and Russell Crowe watching Kim Basinger stroll into a liquor store in L.A. Confidential. It firmly plants the movie in the heightened universe of film noir, with its hot-blooded gumshoes and coolly captivating femme fatales, its furtive schemes and dastardly crimes. Yet because Park is an uncommonly gifted stylist, nothing about his thrilling new picture feels imitative or traditional. Noirs were always sexy, but they’ve never been quite this voluptuous. Read More

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The Handmaiden: Don’t Trust Anyone, the Help Least of All

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kim Tae-ri is a servant with a secret in Park Chan-wook's amazing "The Handmaiden"

Murder, deception, hot sex, cold death, severed fingers, poison cigarettes, vials of deadly blue liquid, monsters lurking in the basement—The Handmaiden, the exquisite and electrifying thriller from Park Chan-wook, has it all. A fire-breathing romance wrapped inside a stately period noir, it is simultaneously gorgeous and grotesque, a rampaging id colliding with a meditative superego. That may sound contradictory, but The Handmaiden doesn’t need to choose between beauty and excess. Over the course of this serpentine, deliriously entertaining film, excess becomes beauty.

Nothing about this frenetic, fastidious movie is traditional or predictable, except perhaps that it feels like the logical next step of Park’s career. Deemed a provocateur ever since he crashed onto the cult scene with Oldboy, Park has taunted and delighted audiences with his singular combination of immaculate craft and utter debauchery. For me, Oldboy strayed a bit too far toward the latter (I’ve yet to see the other two films in his “vengeance” trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance), but he smartly tweaked his formula with Thirst, a warped love story that used vampirism to explore the insatiable need for human connection. Then came the terrific Stoker, a cold-blooded tale of Gothic horror that Park set in the sweltering heat of the American South. Now he returns to his native South Korea, but while The Handmaiden finds Park going back home, it demonstrates that his virtuosic command of cinematic language is more vibrant than ever. Read More

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The Best Movies of 2013, #10: Stoker

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

[Note: The Manifesto has reviewed 89 different 2013 releases up to this point. Some were bad, some were good; some reached for greatness and failed, others didn’t reach at all. In short, it was another year at the movies. To that end, this review constitutes the beginning of our countdown of the year’s 10 best.]

On its face, Stoker, the first English-language effort from the Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, is vulgar to the point of childishness. Its plot traffics in incest and murder. Its central characters are a lecherous uncle, an unhinged mother, and a depraved daughter. It is, without doubt, lurid, tawdry, and obscene. Yet it is also—at least for viewers who admire bold and authoritative filmmaking—provocative, debonair, and sexy. It is pulp entertainment dressed up as high art. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Either way, it’s spellbinding. Read More

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