어쩔수가없다
****/****
starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Yejin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min
screenplay by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, Jahye Lee, based upon the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake
directed by Park Chan-wook
by Walter Chaw I was a fan of Donald Westlake from a young age. It was his Parker books, of course, the gateway drug to his other meticulously crafted crime novels. I always liked him more than Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard, admiring his invisible prose, that magical ability he shares with Stephen King to write things that read as if they were written without the intermediary of text. Straight into the vein and doesn’t leave a mark. I kept up with Westlake through college and beyond. I read The Ax the year I moved in with the girl who became my wife. Based on the title, I was expecting Westlake’s inevitable transition into splatterpunk–a hardcore slasher, perhaps. What I got was a wry takedown of capitalism uncomfortably close to the reality I was choosing by settling down, getting married, and getting a job working for someone else. I didn’t see the connection then, but I’ve thought about The Ax off and on over the past 28 years. Still married, two kids college-aged, several recessions, bailouts, disastrous administrations… A series of jobs where I shot up the ladder before stepping off because I couldn’t reconcile what was required to succeed with the image I had of myself as a person. Every time I hit rock bottom, The Ax was waiting with that shit-eating, “toldja so” grin.
The Ax is about a middle-manager at a paper plant, one Burke Devore, who is laid off during a round of corporate downsizing and, recognizing his skills are particularly niche, contrives a plot to murder other schlubs who share his mostly useless work experience in order to enhance his re-employment opportunities. It’s a comedy–the darkest of satires. So of course the first person to adapt it is legendary political satirist Costa-Gavras, who wrote and directed his Le Couperet (The Ax) at the age of 72, in 2005. A faithful adaptation, it’s phenomenal. Now, Park Chan-wook, possibly the best director working in the world right now, has taken a crack at it. What is unimaginable on a technical level for others is like an afterthought for Park, so that the real challenge for him is, I think, finding ways to redefine formal convention. The sideways tracking shot of the melee in Oldboy, for instance, which has itself become a kind of prototype for the modern action sequence. Matching his extraordinary gracefulness as a filmmaker (possibly rivalled only by Spielberg) is a keen grasp of all the nuances of interpersonal relationships and, most importantly, the courage to honour the dark places his stories sometimes take him. Park is a genius. His films are brilliant and, in their way, “invisible,” just as Donald Westlake’s prose is invisible. “This is obviously the work of a master,” you will mumble to yourself, and how is it over already? His last film, Decision to Leave, not only used Hitchcock correctly in a sentence, but would also rank high among the master’s best. If Decision to Leave was Park’s Vertigo, No Other Choice is his North by Northwest.
Park opens on a Lynchian tableau, a heightened portrait of suburban ecstasy as Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) sticks an eel, a gift from the American venture capitalists who have bought the paper company where he’s won awards, on the barbecue. His gorgeous wife, Mi-ri (Son Yejin), hints at the meat’s effects on male potency as his teenage stepson, Si-one (Kim Woo-seung), and cello-prodigy daughter, Ri-one (Choi So-yul), hang out with their twin Golden Retrievers, preciously named Si-two and Ri-two. Their backyard is beautiful. Their home is beautiful. Man-su doesn’t know that the gift is part of a severance package. There’s nothing his new bosses can do about it, they claim. There’s never anything new bosses can do about anything; it’s a funny quirk of new bosses. I love how Park’s vision of domestic bliss is tied to the myth of financial comfort and professional accomplishment, a decidedly 1950s American nuclear construct he exaggerates into camp fantasy. This is all an illusion, a blueprint to living inauthentically–an imitation of transcendence in the life of a beast of burden: a nation of pack animals at the pleasure of billionaires. Man-su marvels at the perfection of the day: “C’mon fall,” he says to the heavens, and I don’t know if it translates in Korean, but in English, and in hindsight, this feels more like Man-su tempting fate than welcoming autumn. He gathers his family into a big hug and tells them how absolutely, perfectly happy he is. He has everything. He is Roger Thornhill going to a three-martini lunch in Manhattan. He is Job right before the cosmic hammer smites him.
When the spell breaks, Man-su and Mi-ri believe their savings and Man-su’s severance will give them enough time for Man-su to land a new job. We always believe that, and it’s never true. They cut back, going so far as to cancel their Netflix subscription in one of the film’s funniest and subtlest gags. They put their beloved house on the market, send their dogs to live with Mi-ri’s parents, take Ri-one out of her cello lessons, drop their dance class, and learn eventually that their trauma has driven Si-one into a dalliance with petty larceny. A litany of unfortunate events. Man-su, now thoroughly emasculated and ready to try anything, figures out how to get the small population of paper experts competing for the jobs he’s applying for to send him their resumes and contact information. I should mention the old gun he keeps in a display case in his living room. It’s a relic his father brought home from the Vietnam War: an antique he looted from a fallen enemy, and a reminder of the toll of conflict for his son, who plans to use it in his own war. Once hunters, we are reduced to placing “bait” in the want ads. Once warriors, our field of battle has become corporate, and the fight for survival isn’t waged against other humans anymore, not really, but against automation, vulture capitalists, and the eradication of the middle class as the wealth gap expands geometrically. No one survives this game. The goal isn’t to upend the ruling class. The goal is to die more slowly.
Park’s changes from the book are manifold and, for the most part, culturally specific. Man-su is more loyal functionary than inspirational leader of men. He needs to write things on his palm to remember them, and he breaks out in flop sweat and nervous laughter in job interviews. At work, he dresses in Roger Thornhill’s signature zephyr blue, but his uniform is denim and workshirts rather than carefully tailored suits. To me, this is an interesting commentary on what it means to be management half a century on. Lee is South Korea’s Cary Grant, an unbelievably handsome man, charming and easy and occasionally given to playing smooth-as-silk villains. I’ve never seen him like this: pathetic, ordinary, grasping, inadequate, and entirely likeable. Park gives Man-su a terrible toothache that festers in his jaw for much of the film. He uses double- and triple-exposures to tell Man-su’s story as grounded in the material things through which he finds purpose and value, and the spaces he’s marked as indications of success. Man-su has been sold a lie: that happiness is in capitalism, when the only bricks not pressed into servitude in a pyramid are the ones at the very top. He wants to give his family the good life, though his family couldn’t care less about any of that. Maybe the Netflix, but not the rest of it. Mi-ri, in particular, would be the ideal candidate for driving the final coffin nails into this misadventure, but she’s steadfast and reasonable. Her decency makes it worse. A divorcee once already, she would rather be a co-conspirator in whatever Man-su is up to than a two-time loser in the marriage game. Still, I think Mi-ri really loves the dumb motherfucker. Among Park’s many strengths is his depiction of women. I’m thinking of The Handmaiden and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. I’m even thinking of Oldboy–a movie consistently as misread as it is celebrated–despite Park having distanced himself from it, believing the love interest to be shortchanged of agency. One could easily shift critical focus to Mi-ri’s courage in deviating from every social expectation of women to pursue what she wants, the way she wants it. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a crueller representation of both who I am and what I put my wife through.
That’s the thing about The Ax: In every incarnation of it, we never stop rooting for the heroes, never stop seeing them through their homicidal rampages–the protagonist’s bad planning and desperation to retain some semblance of dignity in a culture that judges a man by his job title and salary. We recognize–I do, anyway–that we’re only ever a half-step away from the place he’s landed. The real wonder of No Other Choice is how consistently hilarious and, moreover, inventive it is while its characters are doing terrible things to innocent people. Consider how Park makes a veritable Escher drawing of crowded inner-city developments during Man-su’s stalking of his first victim, recalling the architectural dimensionality of Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography on Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. Look at the way Park uses two round mirrors on a light post to evoke the same sense of being caught naked on the outside edge of a Möbius strip as the surveillance-convention sequence in Coppola’s The Conversation, or how he reveals Man-su’s plan to drop a potted plant on his quarry from a rooftop–an exceedingly stupid and ill-thought-out scheme inspired, it would appear, by Looney Tunes–in a clever, Tenebrae-style crane shot that culminates in Man-su holding a pepper plant in a heavy and dripping ceramic pot over his head. He’s contemplating the choices he’s made and is about to make. Park holds on Lee, and Lee, in the complexity of his performance, doesn’t let him down.
The best sequence in the movie features Cho Young-pil’s “Redpepper Dragonfly,” cranked at full volume. It’s a Korean classic in the Joe Dolan tradition that Park has always wanted to use in a film. Man-su means to kill the depressed, recently cuckolded Bummo (Lee Sung-min) and comes upon him in Bummo’s study while he’s listening to the Cho song on vinyl. Bummo has a huge record collection that his wife, Ara (Yeom Hye-ran), has, I think, come to view as competition for her attention. Man-su, dressed in waders and using an oven mitt to muffle his gun, is mistaken by Bummo for one of his wife’s suitors. An amateur baker, perhaps, interrupted mid-cake by a rush of ardour. “Redpepper Dragonfly” is playing so loudly that Bummo and Man-su can’t understand each other. Then Ara returns. Ara, who has previously sucked what she believed to be a deadly snake’s venom from Man-su’s ankle. (Later, Man-su will Google it and discover the inadvisability of such a treatment.) It’s a long burn of a joke that Park builds, layer upon layer, to this ridiculous and horrible point, this absurd scuffle in a sad man’s study, surrounded by the stuff he’s insulated himself with that expresses what he’s unable to express on his own. “Losing your job isn’t the problem,” Ara says, “the problem is how you deal with it.” Ara can’t believe it’s only taken two bullets to kill her husband. I can believe it, because Bummo is half-dead already.
No Other Choice is fun, if typically brutal in that Park Chan-wook way. Man-su deals with his bad tooth the same way Oh Dae-su deals with his tongue in Oldboy: If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out, as they say. (They also say the toothless get ruthless.) Park holds on a dissolve from another rival’s expansive log cabin to a roaring campfire; the house is on fire, it seems, whether we acknowledge it or not. We catch a glimpse of Man-su trussing up a corpse like he would a pig–like the cadaver laid out and displayed for a student’s curiosity in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, reduced to blue arteries and yellow fat once the pale, waxy skin is peeled and pinned back. In place of catharsis, Park, during the closing titles, offers quick cuts to industrial harvesting machines plucking trees out of the ground, grinding their boughs off, and depositing great logs into uniform biers in a suddenly empty wood. Is No Other Choice about transformation? No, it’s about how utilitarian people are when stripped of their pretensions to art and poetry and the meaning of life; how we are all savage, vicious survivors descended from other survivors, fanged and self-interested. That used to mean fighting against the elements, predators, enemy tribes. Now it means elbowing your way to the corner office. Did you ever wonder why there’s a higher density of sociopaths the higher you climb the corporate ladder? At a certain tier, it’s all sharks. No Other Choice is about getting a job so you can get on with living an unexamined life. The world is only a foul sty if you have to think about it. Do what you’re supposed to do, no matter the cost to the beautiful parts of you and the whispers of your secret self. It’s okay. Don’t think about it. Go back to sleep.
