‘No Other Choice’ Review: A Blackly Comic Skewering of Capitalism

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Selection opens with a household having a barbecue on their luxurious property, as patriarch Younger Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) claims that he’s “acquired all of it.” Instantly you discover how the sky is completely blue and the way the yard is simply too well-manicured. Proper all the way down to Man-su’s canine, who’re cheekily named after his kids, all the things inside Park’s pictures is meticulously composed because the household smashes collectively in a gaggle hug.

This postcard-perfect paradise is disrupted when Younger is laid off from his managerial job on the paper firm the place he’s labored for 25 years. Younger is initially a staunch advocate for everybody on his staff who was additionally laid off, however after months of unemployment and doing menial labor, he’s solely out for himself. Attempting to land a job in his sector, he units his sights on a place at Moon Paper, and stoops to violent measures to safe it.

The movie was tailored by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Jahye Lee from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, a title that works as a double entendre for each the principle character’s firing and his violence. Park’s title change speaks to the farcical method that defines his movie, throughout which “no different alternative” turns into a form of disingenuous mantra, demonstrating how platitudes and apathy reinforce a violent established order.

Early on, the People who lay off Man-su nonchalantly declare that that they had “no different alternative,” which is identical sentiment that his potential new employers echo when rationalizing the necessity to substitute extra of their personnel with synthetic intelligence. At one level, even Man-su says that he has “no different alternative” whereas psyching himself as much as commit his violent acts.

Among the many movie’s ironies is Man-su really having different selections that don’t contain him killing these competing for a job at Moon Paper. He might promote his huge home and transfer his household into an condominium. His spouse, Miri (Son Ye-jin), might revitalize the profession she gave as much as have kids. They might depend on help from Miri’s dad and mom. However the best way Younger sees it, these choices would merely additional distance him from the excessive life that he’s accustomed to.

The movie’s sustained farcicality is such that it may well hold us emotionally at an arm’s size; one scene during which a disturbing occasion of previous home violence is dredged up ventures into slapstick comedy. Which isn’t to say that No Other Selection is impersonal.

Each step of the best way, we’re reminded of how Man-su is failing his household—be it by his paranoia about Miri dishonest on him, or by his stepson, Si-one (Kim Woo-seung), studying the fallacious classes and stealing telephones for his household. It’s telling of Park’s efforts to maintain this caper grounded in private stakes that Man-su’s eventual relapse on alcohol looks like he’s crossing an even bigger ethical line than when he stoops to homicide.

Among the many tragedies and indignities that No Other Selection confronts is the shift from analog to digital—a maybe ironic fixation given Park’s embrace of digital filmmaking, which makes potential some fairly elaborate, and admittedly spectacular, digicam trickery all through the movie. Man-su and his friends cling to paper like so many administrators to celluloid, feeling that they have to use it for concern that nobody else will. It’s a correlation that’s underscored by the movie’s closing montage, which intersplices the credit with a sequence of deforestation photographs.

Right here’s one other irony: Paper and celluloid each have a substantial environmental affect. However neither holds a candle to A.I., which in a approach is the last word villain of the movie: environmentally catastrophic, actively dehumanizing, and oh so good for revenue margins.

A.I. is the one logical endpoint for the system that turns the laid-off into cannibalistic rats. Studying that his whole workforce has been changed with A.I., Man-su asks, “You’ll at all times want one man, proper?” What he’s saying is that he will be that man, and by any means needed. As long as there are folks like Man-su, who turns into a logo of capitalist competitors and exclusion at its most excessive, the system will proceed to churn. Which reveals No Other Selection much less as a tragedy about one man and his household than it’s in regards to the state of the world.

The put up ‘No Other Selection’ Assessment: Park Chan-wook’s Ferociously Farcical Skewering of Capitalism appeared first on Slant Journal.