Ah, the genius of marketing. I used to own a videotape of the American release of Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet (1991) that had a laughably inappropriate cover: candy-colored font, a giant donut with rainbow sprinkles on it, and Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner – both with noticeably larger Photoshopped cleavages – sitting right on top of the pastry. I understand, though I don’t agree with, the logic of the regrettable packaging – how on earth could one sell a dysfunctional family movie about communication breakdowns and bulimia, starring a bunch of thick-accented British actors no one had ever heard of? (Which is actually totally untrue: the cast also includes Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Stephen Rea, and Jim Broadbent – just about as star-studded as any Harry Potter movie, in my book.) But either way, I pity the fool who rented Life Is Sweet, hoping for a light family comedy.
(A digression: As much as I loved Life Is Sweet, I always there was something unaccountably condescending about the whole enterprise, maybe even more than in Abigail’s Party or Nuts in May. But I think Leigh managed to purge himself of that meanness via Naked, as he seemed to lose that patronizing undercurrent in his films thereafter.)
And so I feel similarly sorry for the person who rents Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis on the basis of the American DVD packaging, expecting an epic Korean romance – and who wouldn’t, with that cover of a young couple (described on the back as “two societal misfits”) locked in a kiss, a dove flying above them, rays of light piercing the clouds of a glorious sunset, the tagline “Love knows”, and cherry-picked blurbs (a “rare miraculous whirlwind romance”, says Wesley Morris; “No movie in recent memory has translated so clearly the secret language of lovers normally lost on the rest of the world,” says Michael Atkinson). The critical praise about the film’s romantic aspects isn’t completely inaccurate, but Oasis is a far, far more difficult movie than the packaging lets on. Indeed, it’s also parallel to Lee’s misdirection within the film, leading the viewer into corners one doesn’t quite expect.
Sol Kyung-gu plays Jong-Du, a mildly retarded ex-convict just out of a three-year prison term (for involuntary manslaughter, assault, and attempted rape). Reintegration into society is not easy; the police quickly arrest him for being unable to pay for a meal, and so Jong-Du is accepted back into the house reluctantly by his family.
Sniffly of nose and shuffly of gait, Sol plays Jong-Du as a socially inept mess of tics (come to think of it, much like Horrocks in Life is Sweet). It’s off-putting and distracting, but it’s a nicely fleshed-out performance, as Jong-Du – through his uncensored interactions with other people – isn’t simply reducible to his mannerisms. Jong-Du, as befitting his social awkwardness, (naturally) decides to visit the family of the man he killed at a hit-and-run accident.
This is where he meets Gong-ju (played by the amazing Moon So-ri), the man’s daughter who has been abandoned by her sibling in a dingy public housing estate. Gong-ju has severe cerebral palsy, and is looked after every now and then by her neighbors. It’s an incredible, physically demanding performance from Moon, one that’s difficult to watch. It’s in their cramped apartments that their impossible romance begins to blossom.
So here we have our “two societal misfits”, as promised by the DVD blurb. By the first fifteen minutes any illusions about Oasis being a rom-com would have been violently dispelled. True to the genre, as it were, the outcasts are used to critique the hypocrisy and intolerance of the society at large, and Lee doesn’t hesitate to show this. We feel for the two main characters because the director has written situations where they come up against prejudice repeatedly.
And this comes close to the heart of what seems wrong about Oasis. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with making audiences work, to have characters earn our trust, to complicate audience identification, to make viewers participate in the process of character development. But there’s something almost disingenuous in how Lee sets this up, quite early in the movie, which seems calculated precisely to avoid bathos. There’s nothing necessarily foreseeable about how exactly circumstances play out in the film; what seems predictable, however (though I write this from hindsight), is the sequence of events in the story, about the way Lee engineers the audience’s reactions.
There’s a crucial incident towards the end, for instance, that feels narratively rigged; it’s the kind of deliberately provocative plot point that’s tailor-made for a movie blurb that says “Will leave you debating through the night after you leave the theater!” But though the development logically flows from the preceding scenes, it feels melodramatic and forced, as if Lee felt it was necessary to needlessly amplify the notion that society’s odds are stacked against the two outcasts. I think that idea was already, painfully, crystal clear.
Oasis peers dangerously close into the smiling abyss of sentimentality, especially in short and intermittent fantasy sequences that reflect Gong-ju’s inarticulable desires: she walks and talks and sings and dances, free from her palsy. (There’s one scene in a subway in particular that’s squarely in tearjerker territory, but man, does it work.) They’re overly sentimental, and yet they’re surprisingly, deeply moving, even if they’re also directorial fantasies, because they’re genuinely earned. It’s romantic, yes, but not in ways that one expects, and the person making a “mistake” renting Oasis would probably be all the better for it.
The last shot – a lovely scene of motes dancing in the sunlight of Gong-ju’s bedroom – is a particularly poignant one for the ending of this fine but flawed film, a romance that, despite its grimy and constrained circumstances, manages to soar. Too bad you can see all the wires though.
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