Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2002)

Sul Kyung-gu and Moon So-ri in Oasis

Cast: Sul Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri, Ahn Nae-sang, Ryoo Seung-wan, Choo Kwi-jung, Jin-gu Kim, Son Byung-ho, Ga-hyun Yun, Park Myung-shin, Park Gyeong-gyun. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong. Cinematography: Yeong-taek Choi. Art direction: Jum-hee Shin, Kil Won Yu. Film editing: Hyun Kim. Music: Jaejin Lee. 

Lee Chang-dong's Oasis seems to me a kind of great film, a phrase I don't use lightly, especially about one with scenes so painful that they tempted me to stop watching. At the same time, however, it also has scenes to which my response was a kind of astonished, even reluctant laughter. Lee's control of tone and mood is what tempts me to invoke greatness. When we first meet the protagonist, Jong-du (Sul Kyng-hu), he has just been released from prison after serving time for a hit-and-run that killed a man. (The truth about that incident of vehicular manslaughter is one that Lee keeps from us until a moment of low-key ironic surprise late in the film.) Penniless, wearing only a short-sleeved shirt on a frigid day, the slow-witted Jong-du tries to find his family, only to discover that they've moved away without telling him. The only way he can reconnect with them is by getting arrested. After they reluctantly take in the feckless, undisciplined, unemployable Jong-du, he then decides that he should do something to make amends with the family of the man who died in the hit-and-run. But they're not much better than his own family: They're in the process of moving, leaving behind Han Gong-joo (the amazing Moon So-ri), who suffers from severe cerebral palsy, under the care of her neighbors in a subsidized apartment house for disabled people. They regard Gong-joo as a source of supplemental income. And so the two outcasts, Jong-du and Gong-joo, are thrown together by the indifference and venality of their families. What develops between them could have been a mere sentimental fable about survival of the least fit, but Lee makes it much more with the help of two marvelous actors and a deft use of unexpected details, including touches of fantasy. It's a movie that should come with a multitude of trigger warnings, but for those who can take it, it's a memorable achievement. 

The Handmaiden (Park Chang-wook, 2016)

Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri in The Handmaiden

Cast: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-Ri. Screenplay: Jeong Seo-kyeong, Park Chan-wook, based on a novel by Sarah Waters. Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoon. Production design: Ryu Seong-hie. Film editing: Kim Jae-Bum, Kim Sang-beom. Music: Jo Yeon-wook.

The fine line between explication and exploitation is carefully negotiated by Park Chan-wook in The Handmaiden. To one critic, Laura Miller, comparing Park's film to the Sarah Waters novel, Fingersmith, on which it's based, the film's  scenes of Lady Hideko and Sook-he in sexual congress are "disappointingly boilerplate" and filled with "the tired visual clichés of pornographic lesbianism." But to Jia Tolentino, they're expressive of the liberation of the female characters: "The effect is thrilling -- it's the most satisfying bit of wish-fulfillment and fantasy in a movie that is pornographic in more ways than one." Pornography, as Justice Potter Stewart once ruled, lies in the eye of the beholder; you can't define it but you know it when you see it. I, for one, don't see it in The Handmaiden: The scenes that disappointed Laura Miller and satisfied Jia Tolentino seem to me more athletic than erotic, though I side with Tolentino's conclusion that they're integral to the film's portrayal of a kind of liberation. Lady Hideko and Sook-he have freed themselves from the demands of men, from the creepy audience at Hideko's readings from her uncle's collection of sadistic erotica, and from the faux Count Fujiwara's manipulations of both women. In the end, The Handmaiden seems to me more successful as an ingenious erotic thriller than as a tribute to female liberation, but perhaps the truth is that the film is neither one nor the other, but rather a finely articulated blend of both.