No Other Choice and the Generational Impacts of Capitalism

This review contains spoilers.

Park Chan-wook’s newest feature film No Other Choice is a South Korean capitalist critique through a provocative lens. It follows You Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a “paperman” of 25 years who has been fired as a manager from his company after restructuring by the new American owners. This prompts him to plan the murders of the three other men eligible for a job opening at the successful company Moon Paper, taking them out so that he can pass the interview without a hitch. The film is a hilarious and illuminating critique of the lengths people will go to maintain the status quo in an almost cartoonishly capitalistic South Korea; however, where it stands out from other works with similar politics is its incorporation of generational gender roles into this critique.

During one of his first interviews after being fired, Man-soo asks his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), to name his biggest flaw. She responds that he loves plants too much, and that he is “a vegetable.” Not long after this scene (and the interview Man-soo bombed), we see him break a branch on his bonsai tree while surrounded by greenery in his painstakingly maintained greenhouse. The bonsai tree is never seen again, and with it goes Man-soo’s patience. The plant is seemingly replaced by the red pepper plant Man-soo acquires after he gets the idea to take out his competition. Red peppers are often used in Korea as a phallic euphemism, and by proxy, represent masculinity in general. The bonsai, which takes even-temperedness and care to maintain, is replaced by the pepper plant, representing the rash actions taken by a man under pressure from society, family, and self to perform.

Though Man-soo keeps his crimes hidden from his family, this pressure seeps into his interactions with them. When discussing the character of Man-soo, Director Park Chan-wook brought up a scene in which he pushes his daughter Ri-one (Choi So-yul) on a swing outside of their home. The camera shoots from her perspective, tilting up and down, bringing the audience closer and farther from Man-soo in conjunction with Ri-one swinging towards and away from him. A distance is created between the two characters, oscillating between understanding and unintelligibility. This creates a sense of distance between Man-soo and his daughter, and this opaqueness of character is also seen clearly in how he and his wife’s interactions develop throughout the film.

At the beginning of the film Mi-ri and Man-soo are a unit, moving as smoothly through the domestic routines of setting the dinner table and taking the kids to school as they move through their couple’s dance class choreography. When Man-soo loses his job, Mi-ri is the one who sensibly puts them on a budget: trading in their two expensive cars for a cheaper option, cancelling their Netflix subscription, and preparing to sell their home. However, as the film progresses, their relationship becomes less open and balanced, and Mi-ri becomes less active. She sees Man-soo coming home late but with no evidence of an affair; she knows he is not going to the interviews he dresses for every day; she even finds the 3-D printed shotgun Man-soo made as a replica of his father’s North Korean handgun from the Vietnam War. Though she laments to her daughter that “both of the men in the house” are keeping something from her, she doesn’t truly seem that appalled, never talking to Man-soo about the crimes she evidently knows he has committed. Her desire to keep her lifestyle–her tennis lessons, their couple’s dance classes, Ri-one’s cello tutoring–surpasses the need for transparency in their relationship. Man-soo creates the distance by keeping his actions secret, but Mi-ri endorses it through her role as a complicit observer.

Where the female characters are brought further away from Man-soo as the film progresses, his teenage son Shi-one (Kim Woo-seung) is brought closer to him. A sequence of one of Man-soo’s murders is crosscut with a shoplifting crime committed by his son. After committing an act that seems almost routine, they both rush home in the rain. The hole Man-soo had prepared to bury the body of his victim had to be used to bury the phones Shi-one stole from an acquaintance’s shop, creating an even clearer link between these two incidents. Both want to provide for their families, with the son’s motive specifically being cited as “wanting to help out his mother,” who had to quit her tennis lessons and take up a part-time job as a dental hygienist after Man-soo was fired. Men are seen as having to do the necessary evils in order to keep food on the table–or in this case, to keep up their middle-class lifestyle. The necessary evils also serve the purpose of perpetuating capitalistic ideals, namely that work and class status are inextricable from one’s identity as a father or son.

There is a particular moment in the film that furthers both these gendered and generational relationships to capitalism, using burial as a motif. At her son’s behest, Mi-ri digs up one of the bodies in their yard at night, but tells Shi-one it was simply a pig buried to fertilize the recently planted apple tree. Despite having concrete proof of what Man-soo had done, Mi-ri continues to turn a blind eye. At the end of the film, she reprimands Ri-one for playing near the site of the tree, not wanting to confront the actions both she and Man-soo had worked to cover up. This interaction between mother and daughter emphasizes the gendered impacts of capitalistic rhetoric: Mi-ri believes that keeping silent and not addressing what happened is the right thing to do; by steering Ri-one away from the location where the secret is buried, she passes on these traits of complacency and avoidance to her daughter. Ri-one, who is autistic, does not articulate her thoughts verbally: she speaks only by repeating what others in her family have said. This makes the core of the generational relationships in the film explicit: you take in and espouse the beliefs of your parents, whether through verbal expression as Ri-one does or subconsciously like her brother.

Shi-one understands from Man-soo’s actions that his father believes one’s ability to provide for their family is the most important trait, even above honesty and adherence to the law. Man-soo passes down this idea verbally as well, telling Shi-one the story of his father. A once-successful pig farmer, he had to bury all of the pigs under the very house where they live after they contracted a disease. Because of the financial burden and shame of economic failure, Man-soo’s father committed suicide. Man-soo repeats multiple times that he “didn’t see his father” when he hung himself in the barn, but the look in Lee Byung-hun’s eyes–and the fact that Man-soo tore down the barn immediately after buying back his childhood home–says otherwise. It is also notable that the only family member who witnesses Man-soo’s criminal activity is Shi-one, who sees him through the glass greenhouse, which is built on the land where the barn once stood. The motif of burial introduced through Man-soo and Shi-one’s parallel crimes earlier in the film is solidified here with the addition of the grandfather’s story. All three men have buried what they did not want others to see: the failed farm, a dead body, and a dozen stolen iPhones. The core of what makes these things shameful, however, is a misguided association between identity and economic power. This conflation of self with employment, and thus the capitalistic system itself, leads to different types of harm as the generations progress: harm of self in the case of Man-soo’s father, and harm of others in the case of Man-soo and his son.

The root cause of this suffering is not addressed; Man-soo only resolves the surface issue. Park Chan-wook uses a brilliant metaphor to convey this idea: Man-soo has a painful, rotten tooth that bothers him frequently throughout the film. Despite his wife telling him multiple times to get it examined, he refuses to address it. He instead chooses to “brute force” his way through the pain, much like how he forces his way into the next job without acknowledging the capitalistic system that has been causing his pain the entire time. During the Q&A following the film, Park mentioned that Man-soo chooses to “play within the game” rather than take out the people who set it up. Using the imagery of the interview room, Park described that, rather than add another chair, Man-soo chooses to force himself into that singular seat. Where other film critiques of capitalism tend to present it as an uncompromising and unmerciful wheel that crushes all in its path, Park presents an alternate reading: that the wheel can only turn because of the people pushing it. Because he played by the rules of the game, Man-soo is able to get away with poorly executed murders and being caught by multiple members of his family. The retribution does not come at the hands of the legal system, but the fact that Man-soo will have to live with what is buried (quite literally) for as long as he lives–and will inevitably pass it on to his children. Just as the evidence of his crimes will fertilize the newly planted apple trees, his actions will cultivate the moral character of his family’s next generation.

Hannah Smith is a junior in Columbia College majoring in Film and Media Studies and East Asian Studies. When she’s not at the movies, you can find her listening to music, dancing, or reading.

@hhannah_smithh