He has everything -- and loses it

   

    Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), the main character in No Other Choice, has a lovely house, a beautiful wife, two children, and two Golden Retrievers. As a manager at a paper manufacturing company, he considers himself a valued and respected member of society. He's living his best life.

    You needn't be a fortune teller to predict that director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave) is setting Man-su up for a calamitous fall. Park deflates the balloon of Man-su's success with one piercing blow after another.

   When an American corporation takes over the paper company to which Man-su has devoted his life, he loses his job and, eventually, his sense of well-being. Man-su's confidence circles the drain, awaiting the last swirl that will flush everything he cherishes away.

     Getting fired in Korea, he says, is like having your head chopped off with an axe. After 25 years of loyal service, which included the coveted honor of "Pulp Man of the Year," Man-su discovers that in a bottom-line world, loyalty isn't always reciprocated.

      Park’s movie has a satirical sting, but taking a step back from the story helps us understand that in some ways Man-su has allowed himself to be played by the system. If he were in politics, he’d be called a useful idiot, someone who refuses to understand that he swallowed the corporate line while never imagining that it might give him serious indigestion.

     What’s Man-su to do?

      To begin with, he attends a support group where displaced men try to convince themselves that they'll be okay. They recite affirmations as they tap the side of their heads, as if trying to beat positivity into their otherwise depressed brains. 

      It's not enough. More extreme measures are needed.

      After suffering a series of humiliations, Man-su decides that he must kill a manager at a competitive company and then apply for the man’s job. But there's a problem. Because others are more qualified for the position, Man-su must murder them as well.

     Park transforms a capitalist horror story into a darkly comic exploration of one man's desperation in the face of relentless automated "progress."

     In every sense of the word, Man-su has been downsized. His wife (Son Ye-jin in a slyly amusing performance) returns to work as a dental technician, and Man-su winds up unloading trucks at a big-box store.

    Kim Woo-hyung, Park's cinematographer, brings bracing clarity to the movie as Man'su's indignities mount. The house will have to be sold; the family might have to move into an apartment. The dogs are sent to live with Man-su's in-laws. A job interview goes poorly. A neighbor turns up with a plan to purchase Man-su’s beloved house. 

     How humiliating it all is.

     The Ax, a 1977 novel by Donald E. Westlake already inspired a French version from director Costa-Gavras. But Park's broadly engaging approach to Westlake's work adds dashes of slapstick, off-kilter humor, and farce. 

      Two men (Lee Sung-Min and Cha Seung-won) stand in the way of Man-su's ability to land a status-saving a job at the Moon Paper Company, a business flush with cash because of a recently acquired Japanese contract. 

      Telling glimpses of the lives of Man-Su's rivals flesh out the story. Lee's character, for example, also has a lifestyle that will be difficult to sustain. His badgering wife (Yeom Hye-ran) mercilessly urges him to abandon his dream of returning to paper making.

     In large part, the jokey take on the Man-su's murderous scheming derives from his amateurish  incompetence. A struggle for a gun becomes a slice of broadly depicted silliness, absurd characters jostling with an absurd situation.

    Park manages the movie's tonal shifts easily, including tension when needed. No Other Choice has been assembled with the confidence of a master who has made a comedy about the way so many are drifting toward irrelevance.

    But not Park’s movie. By the movie's end, its relevance and stinging ironies have crystallized. I wouldn't insist that Park has made an anti-capitalist screed. As an artist, he's capable of looking beyond the moment he so ably depicts to explore the contours of human folly and its bitter consequences.

Twists and eroticism in this thriller

In the Handmaiden, director Park Chan-wook keeps us guessing about who's being conned.

If you're familiar with the work of Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director of movies such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, you already know that perverse breezes waft through Park's work in ways that spur his considerable and often bizarre powers of invention.

At first blush, Park's latest -- The Handmaiden -- seems like the director's most conventional work to date, an elegant period piece set in Korea during the 1930s. Don't be fooled, treachery looms.

The story begins when a young woman named Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) becomes a maid for Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a woman whose strangely tormented upbringing rises to the surface as the movie's three-part, time-bending structure unfolds.

Enter Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a Korean con man. Korea was under Japanese rule in the 1930s, so it paid for Fujiwara to take a Japanese name and pose as a nobleman.

Fujiwara, who's after Lady Hideko's inheritance, makes Sook-hee a player in his attempted con. He wants to marry Lady Hideko.

Park divides the movie into three sections, each allowing us to understand more about the story as it's told from varying points of view.

As it turns out, Lady Hideko lives with her weird uncle. A book dealer specializing in exotic porn, Uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong) has imprisoned his niece on his estate -- a bizarre place that's divided into two distinct architectural styles: British Victorian and traditional Japanese. Take this bit of architectural schizophrenia as a bow to Fingersmith, the 2002 British novel by Sarah Waters on which the movie is based.

Twist upon twist unfolds as Park keeps us off guard about who's conning whom.

When the relationship between Lady Hideko and Sook-hee turns erotic, Park offers explicit depictions of their sexual encounters. I leave it to you to decide whether a mention of explicitly depicted and very spry lesbian sex constitutes a warning or an invitation.

Eventually, Park adds the expected violent flourishes, and, by the end, he tempers the movie's real perversity -- the way the characters attempt to exploit one another -- with as sweet a love story as a director such as Park can muster.

Despite the movie's often beautiful images and Park's deliberate pacing: The Handmaiden can't conceal the director's preoccupation with vengeance, lust, perversion and all around weirdness. Did I mention romance? Yes, that, too.

You're right to think that such disparate elements should be slamming against one another with all the grace of colliding garbage can lids. But Park's ability to fit conflicting ingredients into the movie's overall design results in a sly, seamless and exceptionally accomplished piece of work.

Lots of menace with no place to go

A talented Korean director shows off his skills but Stoker still falters.
Generally, I have mixed feelings when directors from other countries -- particularly those with distinctive styles and edgy concerns -- travel to the U.S. for English-language productions. I root for the their success, but can't help wondering whether something vital will be lost in translation.

In his first U.S. movie, the often brilliant and always provocative South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (director of movies such as Oldboy and a trilogy of Vengeance films) completes about three-quarters of the journey to a new culture. Park's Stoker can't quite provide the rich payoff his movie promises -- but that's not to dismiss the film's early going, a virtuoso display of style in which Park creates an atmosphere chilled by impending, perhaps inevitable doom.

Working from a screenplay by Wentworth Miller, Park seems to be riffing on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Both movies make room for an ambiguous character named Uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotton in Hitchcock's movie and Matthew Goode in Park's version of a story about an uncle who shows up after his brother dies in a car accident.

Uncle Charlie works to establish a bond with his niece (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman he's never met before. In fact, she never knew her father (Dermott Mulroney) even had a brother until Charles turns after Dad's death.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that both mother (a convincing Nicole Kidman) and daughter (perhaps to a lesser degree) are falling under the sway of the preternaturally helpful Uncle Charlie, played with cagy confidence by Goode.

To further complicate matters, Wasikowska's India Stoker is going through the weirdness of her own sexual awakening; the gifted Wasikowska is up to conveying every bit of that weirdness. India displays the normal recalcitrance of an 18-year-old but augmented by something that seems significantly creepier.

There's little question that Park has control over the movie's imagery, its performances and its eerie soundscape, all of which heighten the sense of uneasiness he skillfully creates.
Park tries to maintain ambiguity as he builds toward what should be (but isn't) a whopping and intelligent finale.

Park and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung find plenty of opportunities to show off their mastery, but the screenplay -- which seems rooted in India's fantasy life and dark capacities -- ultimately doesn't reward our patience.

Park's stylistic flourishes (India likes to arrange shoeboxes in horseshoe shapes) seem designed mostly to keep us off balance. They do, but the danger in this kind of approach (violent but less so than some of Park's Korean movies) is that it sets a high bar for the movie's payoff.

Without going much further, I'll just say that Park doesn't vault over the bar he sets for himself, and many will conclude that, in this case, the result is a little too frustrating, a carefully prepared meal that offers too little by way of real nourishment.