No Other Choice review – sensational state-of-the-nation satire from Park Chan-wook | Venice film festival

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new movie brings his normal effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a sort of storytelling momentum that may accommodate every kind of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions. It begins out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then someway morphs into one thing else: a portrait of household dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner disaster, and the state of the nation itself. It’s primarily based on Donald E Westlake’s satirical horror-thriller The Ax from 1997, beforehand filmed in 2005 by Costa-Gavras, to whom this movie is devoted. It is probably not Park’s masterpiece however it’s the finest movie within the Venice competitors up to now.The scene is an ideal household dwelling, the place the person of the home, You Man-su (performed by Korean star Lee Byung-hun), is benignly presiding over a late-summer barbecue within the backyard, grilling some eels which have been given to him by the brand new American house owners of the paper manufacturing unit the place he’s employed. Adoringly wanting on are his spouse Miri (Son Ye-jin), her teen son from a earlier marriage, their daughter (a cello prodigy), and their two beautiful Labradors. However these eels are actually a heartless and misjudged a part of a job payoff; the brand new US masters are driving by means of brutal redundancies and Man-su is amongst them. He’s devastated, however with out the emotional language to precise or perceive how profound this loss is to him. He’s fanatically determined to reclaim his manhood within the eyes of his spouse, youngsters and pets by getting a brand new job within the paper trade inside the three months earlier than his severance pay runs out.However that’s not possible, so an excellent concept happens to him. He units up a phoney recruitment advert in a paper trade commerce journal, and with impressed crafty, Man-su makes it clear that, as the top of a paper agency dedicated to the product, he’ll on precept settle for no on-line functions; they must be on paper through the publish, thus leaving no digital path for the crime he intends to hold out. Utilizing the private data that these trusting candidates will ship him, he’ll homicide all of them, thus making a string of job vacancies within the instances of candidates who’re in work, and, within the instances of the unemployed, a discount within the quantity of competitors.When requested if he would possibly strive employment outdoors the paper trade, Man-su stubbornly says he has “no different selection”, whereas the American bosses say they’d “no different selection” however to deliver down the wage invoice. Now he has “no different selection” however mass homicide.At first, this movie seems like a serial-killer comedy within the fashion of Type Hearts and Coronets, or a salaryman-shame nightmare within the vein of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out and Nicole Garcia’s The Adversary. However actually Park refuses our expectations: Man-su doesn’t work by means of his victim-base as we would think about. The truth is, he stalls early on. Different narrative priorities come to the floor. We uncover that the home, which he’s in peril of dropping as a consequence of mortgage default, was his childhood dwelling, and the positioning of a profound trauma related to his father, a pig farmer. (One among his victims will get trussed up as compactly as a pig: an unforgettably nasty picture.) So all this is likely to be solely tangentially related to his sacking.There are additionally subplots of household disarray, which loom out of the display screen fairly as importantly because the weird murder marketing campaign. Miri will get a job as a hygienist, helping a dentist whom Man-su suspects has designs on her, and he immediately will get a psychosomatic toothache, which he naturally refuses to get handled; the considered his spouse’s suspected lover, assisted by his spouse, bending over his open mouth is unthinkable. Then his son is accused of stealing cell phones from a retailer owned by an obnoxious neighbour; and the son additionally witnesses his dad doing one thing unusual within the greenhouse, which is to be the positioning of a sensationally bizarre dream sequence whose pure inexplicability seeps into the remainder of the movie.And all through all of it, a deadpan notice of knockabout black comedy isn’t completely absent. What on earth does all of it imply? Some ultimate, extraordinary photos of hi-tech paper manufacturing and eco-devastation maybe gesture at a that means: mechanisation is coming, the algorithm is king, persons are much less necessary and our human intentions and human company are descending into farcical irrelevance. No Different Selection screened on the Venice movie pageant.