I just finished watching Oasis, a Korean movie directed by Lee Chang-dong. It is perhaps the most emotionally challenging movie I have ever seen. It is a tragic love story but also a merciless social critique. I’ll be attending a talk on the movie tomorrow given by Kim Kyung Hyun from UC Irvine and I’ll write more then.
I’m not intending to boast that I went to see Oasis in its Venice film festival premiere two years ago;), but only to agree with you that it was challenging to see, both emotionally and even ethically. That movie has been mentioned as one of the problematic cases concerning rape and view on women in general in Korean movies.
This is in Korean, but it’s a very sharp critique towards that phenomenon in Korean movie circles (Ohmynews). “If there’s a rape scene in an East Asian movie, people immediately think it’s a Korean film” was one quoted comment in the article.
Ya, I have mixed feelings about that. The fact the main character is actually a convicted attempted rapist who again attempts to rape his eventual lover Gong-ju kind of sits uneasily in the stomach. A few people left the showing of the movie during that initial rape scene. The emphasis on him being a somewhat mentally disturbed person who, we later learn, made a huge sacrifice for his family and became the only real human contact for a used and abused Gong-ju is partially redeeming, but the character of Jong-du injects a considerable amount of moral ambiguity into the movie.
Overall though, I think the movie’s contribution as a social critique is considerable, and I hope to learn more about what others think about this at the talk tomorrow. The mentally disabled are neglected and abused around the world (including I’m sure in Norway where I think we have fairly developed resources at their disposal) but I have heard that in Japan and Korea this seems to be especially the case. Giving audiences a taste of this and allowing them to see more than the beautiful faces and nationalistic bodies that fill many of the more popular Korean films is refreshing, even if the movie leaves you completely drained emotionally. This gave me a solid taste of the margins of Korean society, which I’m always curious to learn more about.
Well, I have to say that for myself, after seeing “Shirumido” with you in Shinjuku, that I won’t be seeing another Korean movie until I know for sure it doesn’t have a rape scene. Social critique is good, but I just don’t want to see a rape scene.