Skip to main content

The Perfectly Cogent and Bitter Satire of No Other Choice

None are exempt from the dehumanization of capitalism. It has always been true but has felt supercharged in the modern era. The movements of monopolies, mergers, conglomerates leaves so many people behind, who are then forced into desperate circumstances to hang onto the comforts of their lives and livelihoods. And whatever comes of it is no guarantee. There is no job security in the modern age -not really. So few understand how close they are to the brink until they are literally looking down it.
No Other Choice is Park Chan-wook’s Parasite. Just as Bong Joon-ho’s now classic film examined the impacts of late-stage capitalism and the extremes it drives people towards, so too does his friend Park’s new movie showcase with raw anger the ramifications of an unfeeling system on everyday people forced to contend with it for their survival. Where Bong honed in on a poor and struggling family, Park centres a patriarch who is notably much better off -but the weight that is felt is much the same; though Park invests his film with beats of much crueler irony than Bong, his hero prompted to more severe action simply to hedge his bets at not losing the lifestyle he’s built and feels he deserves.
The film is actually adapted from an American novel called The Ax by Donald Westlake (it was previously made into a French film but has interestingly not been translated in its native country). Lee Byung-hun stars as Yoo Man-su, a twenty-five year veteran of a paper mill who has built a comfortable life off the stability of his job, buying back his beloved childhood home in which to raise his family -consisting of his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), a teenage stepson, young cello prodigy daughter, and two dogs. But then his company is bought out by an American giant and he and all his colleagues are laid off. Unemployed without prospects in his now competitive field of expertise, failing interviews, and facing possible foreclosure of his home and downsizing, Man-su decides to better his chances at a new equivalent job by systematically killing off his competition.
It really is a literal manifestation of the grind, working joes engaged in a clash of violence all for a scrap of sustainability provided by the upper class. On top of that, Man-su has to grapple with the earth having shifted beneath him since he entered the field. A younger manager who laughs him out of a job is engaged in the digital marketing realm -his work half-consisting of TikToks promoting the brand, something Man-su has no understanding of. That value in his work as he worked has been lost, and Lee does a great job communicating the subtle anxiety around that and the inability to fully reckon with it. It is a sad character portrait, especially in light of a viciously sunny opening sequence that contrasts his happy ordinary life with what it will become with the loss of his job. And Park is downright mean about it.
Of course he has fun with that tone. The grimness of Man-su’s machinations is contrasted against his amateur execution of them. The gun he decides to employ for his murders is -ironically given his work- 3D-printed. He is terrible at staking out a place, as with his first intended victim, who gets his own storyline related to his joblessness and cratering relationship with his wife. There’s very much a Coen Brothers-kind of incompetence though in Man-su’s plotting; a confrontation that at one point devolves into three people desperately trying to grab at a gun that has been kicked too far under a desk. Another victim has to be contorted in a manner both amusing and disturbing in order for the body to be disposed of efficiently. Man-su has a complex relationship to his actions as well. He hesitates for his first murder, which proves a critical mistake, he tries to awkwardly shield his eyes from the face of his target whilst trying to shoot them, which goes about as well as you’d expect. And emotionally he makes the mistake of relating with his victims -who are in somewhat the same boat as him with regards to his career. But it is the only way he can be sure to get ahead. He has no other choice.
It's hyperbolic, but it is a potent level of messaging, Park's cynicism with this state of things dripping through the screen. Critique of the establishment in South Korea goes without saying -there is a particularly stinging sequence at the beginning satirizing emotional support organizations for those who lose their jobs; but it is noteworthy that the inciting incident is kicked off by the Americans -not the Chinese, or the Russians or the Japanese, each of whom would have made as much sense. It's reminiscent of Bong's The Host, where American capitalism is established at the start as the instigator of the woes for the Koreans through the run of the story. Park is not blaming the Americans solely, but he is pointing the finger at a pattern of global monopolistic market dominance that they are the spearhead entity of. Those imperialist tendrils (seen also in the family's Netflix habit among other things) are what is ultimately choking out Man-su, symbolizing the comforts and status he is desperate not to lose, and thus rationalizing his violence.
A lot of the movie's bite comes out of its compatibility with Park's boisterously vivid and intentional filmmaking. His curiously mobile camera and compositional editing ensures that no scene is devoid of something interesting in the frame -be it his sometimes intense sometimes comical zooms and close-ups, his eccentric mise-en-scene to impart a tonal cue, or his inventive illustrations of modern communication. His movies are noted for their intense imagery and No Other Choice is no exception -a lot of it concentrated in Lee's anxious or desperate expressions. It is their first movie together in twenty-five years yet the chemistry feels second-nature. They both wring the most out of the drama required -as much as Park roots the movie firmly in his dark and twisted satire, there are moments here and there of real beauty and pathos, particularly where his relationship with his family is concerned -and the consequences his actions have on them.
The movie's ending is a perfect stroke of absurdism, a bleak and damning image of what all Man-su's efforts are really in aid of, Lee forced to exist in a space of denial and delusion. It is pitiful, depressing, a touch infuriating -Park punctuates his point with appropriate venom. No Other Choice isn't quite as thrilling or provocative as some of Park's other movies of late, but it has a profoundly relevant edge and an engrossing conceit. Still at the top of his form, Park is bitterly concerned, and we have no other choice but to pay attention to why.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more