Cowriter and director Park Chan-wook and a talented ensemble of actors have created a dark comedy/thriller for Trumpian times in the best of Korean filmmaking skill and tradition. Highly recommended.
After 25 years in the paper business, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has achieved a respected middle management in the paper industry. He has fallen in love married a single mother Miri (Son Ye-jin), become a father to her son Si-One (Kim Woo Seung) and their daughter Ri-One (Choi So Yul) who has difficulty expressing herself in any other way than through her prodigious musical talent on the cello.
When the Korean paper industry goes through an economic crisis, Man-su's career and those of many of his colleagues who work in pulp turns into pulp over-night. As he realizes that it will be near impossible for him to find another job and his family temporary downshifting to adjust to the lost income looks like becoming a permanent downward spiral, Man-su develops a creative, complex and violent plan to relaunch his career within the brutal capitalist system he finds himself in. His aim to become the provider for his family and give his children the life chances they deserve. How much will he be able to rely on Miri and the children to remain loyal to him as he proceeds to the execute of his plans and plans some executions.
No Other Choice is a beautifully directed and photographed dystopic film for our times. Based on the late Richard Westlake's 1997 novel The Axe (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176811.The_Ax), co-writer and director shows us how the American Dream has become the Korean Dream, at least economically. And whether in the USA or in Korea - Westlake seems to have foreseen that we all live in world made for and then by people like Donald Trump, his family and entourage, where our market economy and then our society are increasingly dominated by the transactional, stripped of highflying liberal idealism and the old legal and ethical norms it somewhat unevenly applied.
Whether domestically or internationally, it is winning that counts. Violence may be one of the means justified by the end as long as it leads to success for your family, your professional career and a certain stability within the overall system.
This is not a system without rules and not a system without ethics. Its rules are rough, brutal and direct. In its honesty, Trumpianism which owes much in its outlook on the world to the German philosopher and legal scholar of the Weimar Republic, the Hitler Regime and then postwar Germany Carl Schmitt (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/), poignantly exposes some of the hypocrisy of what went before. "No Other Choice" demonstrates this brilliantly in places. This makes, at times, for highly uncomfortable viewing for the liberal democratic rule of law-abiding mindset. We shudder as we laugh. The landscape, the photography, the classical music are skilfully designed to heighten the viewers frisson and cognitive dissonance as the action unfolds.
Due in no small measure the excellent ensemble of actors led by Lee Byung-hun as Man Su and Son Ye-jin as his wife the tight rope the film walks between thriller, drama, slapstick and comedy succeeds.
Park Chan-wo dedicates his film to the Greek filmmaker Costas Garvas who in 2005 made a French film adaptation of the Axe, Le Couperet, with actor Jose Garcia. But his own rendering of the story is outstanding and timely in its own right. I recommend it highly.
