When Hollywood tackles a subject like a romance between two mentally or physically disabled people, the result is almost destined to be a piece of sappy sitcom fantasy like Garry Marshall’s “The Other Sister” (1999). What a change–and a revelation–it is to encounter a film like Lee Chang-Dong’s “Oasis,” a gritty, almost brutally unsentimental treatment of an unlikely coupling between a semi-retarded man with a criminal past and the palsied young woman whose father he was jailed for killing in an auto accident. Told in a naturalistic style occasionally broken by fantasy sequences holding out a slender sense of hope but inevitably returning to cruel reality (the most elaborate of which, bringing to life a picture on the woman’s wall, gives the film its name), the picture, despite the grime of its setting, the frequent unpleasantness of its situations and the poverty of its characters, exhibits an astonishing purity of tone and theme.
One of the unlikely partners featured here is Hong Jong-Du (Sol Kyung-gu), a just-released prisoner who’s arrested by the Seoul police when he’s unable to pay a restaurant bill. He’s bailed out by his younger brother Jong-Sae (Ryon Seung-wan) and taken to the small apartment where their mother (Kim Jin-jin) lives with older brother Jong-Il (Ahn Nae-sang) and his wife (Chu Gui-jeong). But he’s hardly welcomed back warmly. The surly Jong-Il gets him a job as a restaurant deliveryman, but the erratic, childish Jong-Du loses it when he wrecks the diner’s motorcycle while chasing a movie crew, and his brother puts him to work in his auto repair shop instead. Meanwhile Jong-Du pays a visit to the family of the man whose life he took in the accident, only to find the son Han Sang-Shik (Sohn Byung-ho) and his wife (Yoon Ga-hyun) moving out of their shabby apartment, leaving his palsied sister Gong-Ju (Moon So-ri) alone there in the dubious care of her unreliable neighbors. (As will later be revealed, they’re moving into a much nicer place in a building reserved by social welfare services for the physically impaired–using her name as the occupant.) Han throws him out, but Jong-Du is moved by Gong-Ju’s beauty and isolation, and returns to the apartment. After her initial terrified resistance, which leads him to become briefly violent, Jong-Du regains control of himself and offers her his help. Eventually the young woman responds to his halting approach, and before long they’re actually enjoying one another’s company and even some “dates” outside. Unfortunately, the reaction of others to the couple is one of fear and dismissal–a scene in a restaurant where they try to get service is especially painful–and when Jong-Du unwisely takes Gong-Ju to his mother’s birthday celebration, the result is a disaster (and leads to an important revelation about how her father was actually killed). Back in her apartment, the two sleep together, but her brother interrupts and calls the police, charging Jong-Du with rape. Gong-Ju, whose condition worsens under stress, is incapable of explaining, and Jong-Du is arrested, escaping to return to Gong-Ju’s apartment for a final visit that’s ever-so-slightly triumphant but ultimately very sad.
There are actually two parallel story threads here. One, of course, is the central romance, beautifully played by Sol and Moon. Consistently working his thin, reedy frame and expressive face, Sol creates a potent figure of a disturbed, volatile but vulnerable man capable of real feeling but also of abrupt anger and violence; Moon is simply amazing at conveying not only Gong-Ju’s crippling infirmity but her underlying emotional pain and intrinsic strength of character. But their relationship is portrayed within a wider context of communal and familial hostility. Neither Jong-Du nor Gong-Ju receives any real support from their relatives; indeed, both are not only ignored by them as much as possible, but used despicably whenever it suits them. The picture is thus not merely a beautifully detailed depiction of a misunderstood, doomed romance, but also a powerful indictment of the treatment of disabled people in contemporary Korea.
There’s nothing slick about the film from a technical perspective, but the grey, grubby production design by Shin Jum-hui and Choi-Young-taek’s deliberately gritty cinematography create the perfect background atmosphere. In the end, in spite of its grimness and its basically tragic outcome, “Oasis” is well titled. This tale of an unexpected exhibition of sympathy crushed by societal indifference and incomprehension may seem parched on the surface, but its honesty and avoidance of comfortable closure make it a refreshing change from the sort of phony uplift such stories ordinarily receive on the screen.