2002 ‘오아시스’ Directed by Lee Chang-dong
Oasis is a love story of two young people abandoned by families. A young man released from prison visits the widow of the man he killed drunk-driving. There he meets her daughter, wheelchair bound with cerebral palsy. Will these two lost people find a way to make their relationship work?
オアシス, Vaheh, Oasiseu, Oasen, オアシス：2002, Oázis, Oaza, Оазис, Vaha, 绿洲, 情慾綠洲, 綠洲
Moving relationship stories Intense violence and sexual transgression emotional, emotion, sad, drama or illness emotion, emotional, moving, sadness or feelings violence, shock, disturbing, brutal or graphic sexuality, sex, disturbed, unconventional or challenging sex, sexual, relationships, erotic or sensual Show All…
This is a challenging look into the world of people many of us would rather avoid. They are the people who are different or challenged in some way, who might interfere with our regular practices, routines and ways of doing things, who might make us uncomfortable, who don't understand or don't follow social rules and conventions, who can't communicate easily.
This is writer-director Chang-dong Lee's harsh and uncompromising story of Jong-du Hong, a simple man with an intellectual disability and violent tendencies and Gong-Ju Han, a young woman living with cerebral palsy. They are complete, real and flawed people who may repel you in one moment and steal your heart in the next. Chang-dong Lee navigates their relationship with brute…
Some people (men) always talk about how you can't let the problematic aspects (racism, misogyny, homophobia) of a movie influence how you rate it. That you have to look past that, and if you don't you have rated it incorrectly. I can see where they're coming from. I don't like pretending that movies, tv-shows, whatever, are bad just because they have problematic (hate that word) aspects. They can be great on all levels except for that aspect, but that one aspect may be enough for some people to dislike it.
I can not like a movie, no matter how great all the techincal aspects of it might be, when it has one of the most uncomfortable attempted rape scenes i've…
A profound indictment of a modern, numbed, pitiless, hyper-urbanized Korea. Oasis is the story of the relationship of a man imprisoned by his mind with a woman imprisoned by her body. It is heartbreaking yet ultimately uplifting. It is essentially a love story of two young people marginalized by their families and society. It becomes a scorching indictment of the cruelty, hypocrisy, and indifference of those institutions as the two characters face profound conflicts with them.
This movie with its violent emotional outbursts and highly charged confrontations is, by any standards, shocking and difficult to watch. The performances Kyung-gu Sol and So-Ri Moon felt so real and pure. The film provides a realization that even physically disabled people experience their own emotions and the need to fulfill and satisfy these are just like any other 'normal' person.
Soul-shredding cinema.
The premise alone for Oasis already sounds like one of the most melodramatic that anyone can come up with, yet Lee Chang-dong creates the exact opposite and forms what I would say is easily one of the most heartfelt and honest romance films that I've come across in recent years. Admittedly I am one who needs to catch up on South Korean cinema but I've nevertheless been rather highly impressed with the different sorts of films that I've come across from such a country. I feel like South Korean cinema is also ignored way too much these days and especially with a film like this, they continue to stun myself.
I would have imagined that the premise could have been…
CW: r*pe
Extraordinary in many ways, and perhaps the most damning critique of ableism I've yet seen. However I kept experiencing problems, and I don't know if they were quite resolved. Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu) is introduced to us as someone who was once arrested for attempted rape. The fact is tossed out and left to linger in mind. We witness him fumbling through various social situations, unresponsive to norms, before encountering Gong-ju (Moon So-Ri). In no time at all, Jong-du attempts his second rape, while Gong-ju appears to offer intense resistance. Jong-du will eventually leave before completing his attempt, but as he and Gong-ju fall into one another's orbit, he never expresses remorse for what he's done, nor does Gong-ju…
Because the broken mirror’s reflective light is even more beautiful...
Jesus, this movie. I was deeply, profoundly stirred by it. I wept openly several times. Not at the admitted melodrama and convenient tragedy that colors the last act, and is frankly less interesting to me, but at the swell of surrealist, humanist heights it hits several times throughout its run time.
It swings from almost unbearably beautiful to, in one scene, just almost unbearable. The first act turn is one of the most difficult scenes to endure I’ve ever seen in a movie. It features such profoundly harmful behavior against such a completely vulnerable person that its intensity almost put me off of the whole thing. If the scene had…
The childish ex-convict, Jong-du, loitering in boredom with no real life direction only to take comfort in the mentally handicapped woman, Gong-ju, who caught his attention. This brutally romantic realism manages to flood the senses. Astonishingly brave performances and articulate direction make Oasis an empathetic soul-shaker.
Watching this is equivalent to the feeling of getting squeezed and crushed by a hydraulic press. A sickening crunch of my body can be heard as soon as Jong-du starts making that tree disappear. Isn’t it lovely? The surging impact of Oasis will leave you deform and decompress. Weepingly sad without melodrama, uplifting with zero trick of manipulation. Emotions are pure and heavy. Lee Chang Dong has done it again with his trademark humanistic…
Now this is cinema.
This is the stuff Martin Scorsese watched the night before he dropped that Cleveland steamer on Disney’s chest.
Punk rock, trigger your darlings, do-not-take-home-to-meet-the-parents cinema.
About half an hour in, there’s a meet cute (or to put it more accurately, a meet ugly) that doesn’t just flip the classic convention on its head, it curb stomps that convention right through the pavement.
My instinctive reaction was repulsion. What the fuck? How are they going to fix that? Why would I give two shits about this character now?!
And then (thank god!) it occurred to me: I was upset because the film wasn’t playing by the rules. I was offended by its complete disregard for cinematic formula.…
I have to admit my first exposure to Chang Dong Lee was rather disappointing. I defaulted on giving Burning four stars because there were things I liked about it, but its cold distance, opaqueness, and general vagueness left me wondering if Chang Dong Lee was actually wrestling with themes of class and masculinity or merely aping it. That thought was put to rest when I watched the truly excellent Poetry and now this, both of which contain empathy, heart, and class consciousness in spades.
However, Oasis contains one nearly fatal flaw that I cannot get over. One so severe it knocks an entire two stars from my rating. That flaw is Moon So Ri. I’m a social worker whose spent…
Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis is undeniably a beautiful film, or at least it’s storytelling is. The way Lee depicts these two damaged characters, affected by disabilities and pushed aside by their families, tugs directly at the heart strings, but not in a cheap, traditional way. Less of a talented filmmaker would have exploited our characters’ disabilities for sympathy from the audience, but instead, Lee Chang-dong portrays his characters in a brutally honest way, not straying away from the bad and the ugly. These characters aren’t simply misunderstood people left behind by society, they are people left depraved of the most necessary things like human affection, and the way our male protagonist lashes out because of this is shocking to say the…
Oasis is a bittersweet and symbolic tale of outcasts finding each other's company in the cold desert of modern society. It masterfully depicts one of the most offbeat yet heartfelt romances in movie history, thanks to director Lee Chang-dong's ultra realistic representation of the Korean society as a soulless desert, as well as his knacks for multi-layered character studies.
We are introduced to Jong-du, a mentally challenged ex-con, who has been labelled as deadbeat and hopeless by his own family, yet ironically performs more caring and heroic actions than any other law-binding characters. It was not until he met Gong-ju, who has cerebral palsy, that he decides to clean up his image. Elevated by astonishing performances by Korean veteran actors,…
