Perp Fiction

Oldboy

Directed by Chan-wook Park

Kontroll

Directed by Nimród Antal

When I heard about a journalist who picked up a copy of the Criterion DVD of Antonioni's L'Eclisse from the office junk-mail pile at a major national publication, I wasn't surprised. Only days earlier, John Boorman's In My Country had suffered a critical beat-down and dismissal from the majority of U.S. film critics. Both Antonioni and Boorman-at one time highly respected artists-have lost their reputations. Such depressing news overshadows this week's new releases.

Is there any point to watching movies outside the context of high standards and imaginative innovation? The Korean thriller Oldboy by Chan-wook Park and the Hungarian comedy Kontroll by Nimród Antal are two celebrated new features aimed at sensibilities different from what formalist-humanists like Antonioni and Boorman used to reach. Both releases, grungy yet slick, are "sexy" (to use the media-savvy lingo that has replaced film scholarship), but that only means that one repackages marketable cynicism and the other sarcasm. Antonioni and Boorman may be able to photograph an ordinary thing and make it look astonishing, or closely explore unique events in human history, but their artistry now faces the scrap heap. Our jaded culture only cares about the schlock of the new.

It's the denial of beauty in Oldboy and Kontroll that marks them as products of our time. Park and Antal appeal to the adolescent taste for outrage and ugliness that defines the peculiar abandon of contemporary movie culture. Each film is a decadent fantasy. In Oldboy, a man who is kidnapped and held hostage in a moldering hotel room for 15 years finally gets out and seeks revenge against his anonymous captors. In Kontroll, a team of subway ticket inspectors searches for a mysterious killer who pushes passengers onto train paths. Neither film is a sociological metaphor, nor a believable presentation of the real world. The Dostoyevsky-style premises may be credible, but it is the paranoia and shock of these tales that the filmmakers indulge.

Uncommitted to realism, Park and Antal are after an extreme form of bedtime story-the nihilistic delight that thoughtless, uncaring, spoiled movie audiences and critics can pretend to themselves is novel. (These action-movie philosophs think saying nothing is saying something bold.) So what can Antonioni's exquisite anxiety over spiritual emptiness or Boorman's graceful contemplation of the struggle to forgive (as exemplified by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission) mean when compared to Park and Antal's fashionable, shallow, youthful alarm?

Exactly how pernicious Oldboy's con-job is becomes clear when Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), on his payback mission, is taunted: "People are cowards because they have imagination. Don't imagine." That's said when Oh's tormentors threaten to break off his teeth with pliers, but such thuggery is no different from Park's filmmaking method. He teases our expectation of dread in order to distract us from sensible thoughts and satisfy our grisliest impulses. The real purpose of his extravagant, grotesque style is to stop our deep (spiritual) imagination. It is a moral necessity that people imagine the best way to live or how society can improve. Oldboy sends the already disenchanted Oh (a wary husband and father) through the tortures of hell because Park simply wants audiences to enjoy his series of elaborately stylized worst-case scenarios.

There's no denying Park's talent. Oldboy is a virtuosic stupid movie. Each set piece uses digital imagery and photographic chic to make Oh's nightmare dazzling and bizarre. One striking long-take is Oh's mano a mano with dozens of goons. The camera slowly pans right, creating a live-action mural of a gang-fight against one as Oh, with a knife in his back, demonstrates his surreal invincibility. A high-tech media player like David Fincher (combo ad-man/film artiste) might possibly rival Park's fancy editing and baroque compositions. ("TV is your school, home, friend, lover," Oh says of his hotel room/prison.) But Park has dazzled the international film community by connecting MTV pizazz with the narrative slick of The Count of Monte Cristo, then giving it a perverse, pornographic spin. Fuck spoiler warnings; I must mention the plot development that has Oh screwing his daughter. It's worth divulging because Park's moral illogic-posing as irony-winds up saying that the incest is okay so long as Oh undergoes hypnosis to not feel bad about it.

There's a fundamental problem with Park's technique when he intercuts past and present to show the villain's sororicide. It's actually a bad use of parallel editing, because it fails to suggest the character's regret. Park merely wants us to be caught up in the thrill of a liebestod. This isn't a smarter humanism than Antonioni or Boorman could produce. Oldboy starts out imitating hardboiled fiction (cynical narrator, film noir atmosphere) then ends up purveying the worst sentimentality. Only the naive or corrupt will take it seriously. No wonder Quentin Tarantino's Cannes jury awarded Oldboy a prize; it goes along with the cultural death wish of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Kontroll makes the West's death wish clear by treating daily life as a horror comedy. Antal toys with documenting Hungary's social malaise by dramatizing the dull work routines of subway employees, but his mordant humor and hipster eccentricity say otherwise. He, too, is in Tarantino mode; his love of movie tropes oversimplifies a professed interest in "the struggle between good and evil."

This hipster goulash ignores quotidian labor, show-off irreverence for the 9000th time. Rebellious ticket inspector Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) opposes the dutiful Gonzó (Belázs László) no differently than high school gang-leaders (the unco-opted versus the co-opted in their quasi-fascist uniforms). But Bulcsú and his boys are little more than imitation Reservoir Dogs types. There's a Buscemi, a Steve Zahn, a Chris Klein, a tall Keitel, while Belázs suggests a young Chris Noth. Antal even does The Wild Bunch/Right Stuff's foreshortened walk of triumph. When Kontroll premieres at the New Directors New Films series on March 30, viewers may be bored with déjà vu.

If there's social critique in this mess, it doesn't translate past the action-movie clichés. What's the true idiom of American-based foreign-language films like Oldboy and Kontroll? I'd guess it's the lack of moral responsibility that QT wrought with Pulp Fiction's fake sophistication by popularizing film buffery with brutality. Kontroll is a yahoo movie for art snobs who know what A Band Apart refers to but not what it means. Oldboy is for those whose passing acquaintance with Sam Fuller is no better than their Dostoyevsky.

"Don't imagine." Those words, written by Park, describe the reigning esthetic in today's film culture. When reading the New York Times' predictable dismissal of Mel Gibson's The Passion Recut, deliberately, obstinately denying "its promise of transcendence," one realizes how rarely movies about transcendence are actually appreciated or tolerated by the media elite. Slick grunge rools. This is the culture that has grown out of Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, Memento, Fight Club. Both Oldboy and Kontroll prevent cinematic transcendence, taking us away from the beauty of human recognition and faith by substituting snarkiness. These stories needn't be committed to film; they should just be tattoos for overgrown kids. (And preferably removable.)