Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

11Looking for Access in NarrativeComplexity. The New andthe Old in OldboyEleftheria ThanouliSouth Korean cinema has become one of the central nodes in the debatesabout world cinema thanks to a flourishing domestic film market, on theone hand, and a remarkable presence in prestigious film festivals aroundthe globe, on the other. The significant transformations that took placein the South Korean film industry in the 1990s, with the opening of themarket to Hollywood competition and the investments of the local conglomerates,appear to have inspired a new turn in South Korean cinema(Paquet 2005, p. 33). Guided by the imperative of being both artisticallyinnovative and commercially successful, South Korean filmmakers have reinvigoratedtheir national filmmaking tradition and have accomplished a highlyrespectable performance equally in terms of box-office receipts and festivalprizes. One prominent example of this new drive is Park Chan-wook’sOldboy released in 2003 as the second installment of a trilogy on the themeof revenge. 1 Oldboy is a typical product circulating in the networks of worldcinema nowadays, stimulating questions such as “what makes a film travelor ‘translate’ to other cultures?”; “how can a filmmaker be original in theera of the ‘already filmed’?”; and, above all, “how can one resolve the tensionbetween Hollywood and national cinemas in this increasing phase ofglobalization?” My purpose in this chapter is not to address these issueshead-on; instead, by focusing on the intricate narratological issues thatthe film’s formal construction raises and by restricting my method to aconsistent textual analysis, I will try to bring to the surface a set of tensionsand contradictions that the film contains on a narrative level, hoping thatmy observations could offer an oblique answer to the aforementionedquestions and hint at the developments that need to be addressed on otherconceptual or cultural areas that relate to world cinema.