Love Will Tear Us Apart: Oasis (2002)
Cast: Kyung-gu Sol, So-ri Moon, Nae-sang Ahn
Director: Chang-dong Lee
Country: South Korea
Genre: Drama | Romance
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review of Oasis is a part of Rowena’s coverage of the 6th Annual Globus Film Series at the Japan Society in New York, Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Concluding the magnificent film series “Love Will Tear Us Apart” at the Japan Society in New York is Oasis, the third feature film from the highly esteemed novelist-turned-filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. Perhaps no other film of such sensitivity and physical and emotional nakedness deserves to cap this collection of confrontational films from Japan and South Korea. In Lee’s limited filmography of five feature films, Oasis is undoubtedly one of his finest and most audacious works. In this film, Lee touches upon the more disturbing, rejected, and hidden aspects of life and corporeality and in the process reveals in a most moving way the (physical, sociocultural/political, ethical) power of attraction between two people.
Lee touches upon the more disturbing, rejected, and hidden aspects of life and corporeality and in the process reveals in a most moving way the (physical, sociocultural/political, ethical) power of attraction between two people.
Actors Sol Kyeong-gu and Moon So-ri play Jong-du and Gong-ju. Jong-du is fresh out of prison, wayward, and more encased in his own world than connected to or desirous of connecting with the people and situations around him, least of all his family. He is constantly sniffling, fidgeting, serving more as someone to avoid due to his lack of tact than someone who provokes empathy. In fact, he often provokes antipathy; as a social being part of a social whole, he is irresponsible and immature. Yet when he meets Gong-ju, a woman who has cerebral palsy, their friendship and burgeoning relationship slowly reveals the contrary. Gong-ju is the daughter of the man whom Jong-du’s brother had killed in a hit-and-run, for which Jong-du took the rap. Jong-du finds himself attracted to Gong-su, and he approaches her with all of the normality of a human being interacting with another human being that everyone else around them—including Gong-su’s family—precisely does not do. While taboo presences in each of their families and in society, Jong-du and Gong-ju with each other develop a connection, whose disturbing complexity departs from the fact that Jong-du attempts to rape Gong-ju in the beginning of their acquaintance.
Jong-du and Gong-ju have the unexpected breathtaking appeal of lovers caught in the throes of l’amour fou, or mad love. The narrow, concentrated way that they pursue each other’s company unbeknownst to either of their families; Jong-du’s surprising care and delicacy even in his child-like abruptness in responding to Gong-ju’s needs (shampooing her hair, doing her laundry); their wonderful, insolent forays into public spaces (restaurants, subway stations) to expand the setting of their relationship beyond the confines of Gong-ju’s apartment; Jong-du’s ambition to learn a trade to impress Gong-ju, are just some of the narrative details that would be completely ordinary if not for the extraordinary circumstances in which these two people meet and initiate a relationship.
Lee constructs Oasis precisely from the power of details as if they were rope strands, at times adding in unexpected fantasy elements as counterpoint.
Lee constructs Oasis precisely from the power of details as if they were rope strands, at times adding in unexpected fantasy elements as counterpoint. For Lee distinguishes himself from his filmmaker colleagues not necessarily through a distinct style but rather through the sheer, hyper-intensity of feeling, its embodiment, and its outward expression in his characters, which can make for harrowing spectatorial experiences. Lee presents Jong-du and Gong-ju in acute, unsentimental detail, as well as their respective families and their manipulations, laying bare all of their grotesqueness and unsettling, naked humanity. Lee does not want the spectator to feel sorry or make excuses for anyone, least of all Jong-du’s flaws or Gong-ju’s condition. In this way, Oasis recalls the documentary film by Japanese filmmaker Hara Kazuo, Goodbye CP (1972), which follows a group of men with cerebral palsy in an unapologetic way, such that one, it breaks the taboo of representations of the disabled and two, it diverges from representations of the disabled as always already ‘noble,’ untouchable victims with no desires or ideas of their own. But desires they have, emotional, intellectual, physical, and sexual. In Oasis, Lee addresses such desires in a moving way without falling into platitudes. For Jong-du and Gong-ju in the film, however, addressing such desires between them has its social consequences.
Part and parcel of capturing the physical intensity of feeling in his characters for Lee are his actors, of course. Lee has been known to be quite demanding of them, and the results are on the screen for all to see. Actors Sol as Jong-du and Moon as Gong-su are tremendous in their performances in the face of the physicality required for their roles, especially for Moon. They flesh out the skin and bones of Jong-du and Gong-su with an unbreakable intensity that meets Lee’s challenging direction head-on. Because Lee favours the disquieting and the ill-at-ease instead of a context of (self-)pity, heartbreak, and the injustice-of-it-all to present Jong-du and Gong-ju, that one comes to find them rather empowering in the end is a testament to Lee, Sol, and Moon’s powerful collaboration and trust.
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