View Point
A dramatic change of pace for Lee, the novelist-turned-director who was recently appointed South Korea's minister of culture and tourism, Oasis is as visually grubby and narratively unhinged as his debut, Green Fish study of suburban sprawl and social liminality told with a variety of genre-flick gut-punches (also screening) as mannered and precise. Filled with chaotic compositions and careening emotions, Oasis fearlessly celebrates the lives of those with nothing left to lose, even if, on occasion, it all too fearlessly veers into a mood-freezing moment of dopey magic realism. What keeps the whole thing together is the lead performances by Moon Sori, who brings to her role as a pretzeled-up cerebral palsy patient such spasmodic physical zeal that one might be tempted to retitle the film Her Left Foot (in His Right Ear), and Sul Kyung-Goo, an actor often plumped at home as the Seoul De Niro. As a criminal miscreant who happens upon his streak of inner goodness while raping the disabled heroine (some long-standing traditions in Korean cinema simply refuse to fall), Sul pulls on a mask of befuddled tragedy that perfectly complements the rubber mug of comedy he sports in the high-grossing buddy comedy Jail Breakers, screening elsewhere in the fest.
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