Monthly Archives: February 2026

  • No Other Choice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Eojjeolsuga eobsda

    Park Chan-wook (2025)

    Yoo Man-su, long-standing employee of a South Korean paper manufacturer, loses his middle-management job after an American outfit takes over the firm.  The loss of earnings jeopardises his comfortable home life with his wife, daughter, stepson, and their two golden retrievers, but he vows to get back into the paper-making industry within three months.  Thirteen months later[1], he’s in relatively very lowly employment.  He can’t keep up the mortgage payments on the family’s house or afford the expensive cello lessons recommended for his little daughter, Ri-one.  Even the dogs have had to be rehomed with his in-laws.  Man-su’s wife, Lee Mi-ri, gets a part-time job at a dental practice to help keep their heads above water but Man-su’s latest attempt to return to a management role ends in humiliation.  He feels like killing Choi Seon-chul, the executive responsible for that humiliation; on the point of doing so, Man-su thinks again, reckoning murder will be worthwhile only if he can take over the dead man’s job.  So he fakes an advertisement for a high-powered position and receives applications to identify his best-qualified competitors in the field.  There are three, including the man he nearly murdered.  Man-su embarks on a mission to kill each one in turn, using the gun his father once used in the Vietnam War.

    No Other Choice is very different from the other Park Chan-wook films I’ve seen – Stoker (2013), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022) – and inferior to all three.  Even in the opening sequence, as Man-su presides over a family barbecue and tells himself, ‘I’ve got it all’, the tone verges on mocking.  The film soon turns into black comedy and stays that way.  Park has directed comedy before:  if this new work is typical of his comic style, I’m relieved not to have seen the movies in question (Trio (1997), I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)).  To assert its comedy credentials, No Other Choice includes a good deal of people tripping and slipping, banging their heads, farting loudly, and so on.  Although the plot becomes convoluted, the style is consistent enough, but the result is laborious right to the end, which takes an unbelievably long time coming.  At 139 minutes, the film is just the same length as Decision to Leave and only a few minutes shorter than The Handmaiden, both infinitely richer pieces.

    The action is often extravagantly violent as Man-su dispatches his rivals and buries their bodies, in both cases clumsily.  It’s no surprise that the film has attracted mostly excellent reviews from critics (at the time of writing, it’s 97% fresh from 215 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes).  Park’s reputation ensures that more than a few members of the press will genuflect automatically.  More remarkable is No Other Choice’s commercial success – in South Korea and North America, where its takings have already tripled its production budget.  Maybe it’s the garish, plentiful mayhem and bloodshed, along with regular dollops of broad comedy, that have helped Park to the biggest box-office hit of his career.

    Despite praise for the film as a ‘sensational state-of-the-nation satire’ (Guardian), Park’s target in No Other Choice seems less the capitalist rat race as such than the outlook of Man-su and those on his hit list.  The paper-making industry is, of course, a line of work that guarantees an ecological subtext throughout.  But Park’s words about his protagonist in an online interview[2] are instructive too:

    ‘Man-su has lived a foolish life where he believes that making money at his job equates to his entire existence, and that to make money equates to being a father and a husband.  So, to him, losing his job means he’s become worthless as a man.  He’s a very pitiful person who is stuck in a small box where he believes that a husband or father has to act a certain way.’

    The idea that a man is defined by his work has a long and not ignoble cinema history, though the man (it usually has been a man) needs to have the right kind of job.  No Other Choice is a clear case in point.  Few of its admirers would enjoy a film about a dedicated teacher who lost their job, let alone blue-collar workers on a factory production line, even in a paper mill.  Man-su is fired from Solar Papers after voicing opposition to the new owners’ downsizing plans that will make junior colleagues redundant, but Park gives him no credit for that.  As his words above suggest, he’s highly unsympathetic to his anti-hero’s plight, never mind that Man-su does need to ‘make money’ to support his family.  When he describes Man-su as ‘pitiful’, Park means inadequate rather than deserving of pity.  An internationally successful film artist is showing his contempt for a confirmed, seemingly conscientious white-collar worker.  It doesn’t make for edifying viewing.

    No Other Choice is dedicated to Costa-Gavras (now in his nineties), best known for Z but who also directed the French-made Le couperet (2005).  This was the first screen adaptation of Park’s source material – Donald E Westlake’s 1997 horror-thriller novel The Ax.  Westlake’s title, hinting at what the paper industry does to both the trees it needs and the workers it doesn’t need, is neater but Park is at pains to justify his.  (He shares the screenplay credit with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar and Lee Ja-hye.)  Solar Paper’s new management, without justifying the laying off of staff, insist they have ‘no other choice’.  Man-su’s first victim is Goo Beom-mo (although it’s actually Goo’s drama-queen wife A-ra who, in a three-way stuggle with her husband and Man-su, fires the fatal shot).  Another veteran of the paper industry and a hopeless alcoholic since he lost his job, Goo laments that he has ‘no other choice’ but paper when it comes to how he makes a living.  Unless I missed it, the second victim, amiable Ko Si-jo, a sales assistant in a shoe store since he lost his paper-work, doesn’t say ‘no other choice’, but Man-su mutters the phrase to himself repeatedly.  In his case, its meaning is a bit more ambiguous.  Man-su could simply be echoing Goo’s sentiments.  He could also be referring to the homicidal journey on which he’s embarked.

    Almost throughout the film, Man-su has bad toothache.  He refuses treatment offered by his wife’s boss, Oh Jin-ho, partly because Man-su suspects the dentist of having designs on Mi-ri but chiefly because the toothache is symbolic.  It represents Man-su’s guilty conscience about what he’s doing or, to put it more positively, nagging vestiges of humanity.  This is the closest that Park comes to sympathy with Man-su.  Abstinent for most of the story, he’s obliged to drink with Seon-chul, to get him drunk and ripe for killing.  Alcohol helps Man-su withstand the pain of yanking out his decayed tooth with pliers, before dispatching his third and last victim.  Once Man-su’s troublesome tooth is out, the film’s normal sardonic service is fully resumed

    No Other Choice‘s best bits are the scenes between Man-su and Mi-ri – though they’re also frustrating since they give a flavour of what Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin, who play the pair, might be capable of in a suppler Park film.  As Man-su, Lee is committed and necessarily energetic throughout but the husband-and-wife exchanges allow him to be more nuanced.  A highlight is a fancy dress party and its aftermath, where dental envy and marital tension collide, and the result is funny and sad.  Delayed on nefarious business, Man-su arrives late to the party to see his wife and Oh, both dressed as Native Americans, dancing together.  He feels a fool in his military uniform, gold braid and bicorne hat.  Back home with Mi-ri, he demands an explanation – ‘What were you thinking?  Matching your costume with Dr Ouch – dressing me up as a goddamn Nutcracker?’  His exasperated wife enlightens Man-su – he was meant to be John Smith, and she was Pocahontas:  ‘Ri-one’s favorite cartoon!  You forgot?  We watched it a million times with her!  When I told Dr Oh I’d be Pocahontas, the whole clinic decided to be Native Americans! … You and I were meant to be a pair!’

    And that’s what they are, even when Mi-ri finds out what Man-su has been up to.  Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin convey so well what attracted the couple (and still attracts them) to each other that their relationship is more interesting than anything else in No Other Choice – whether the botched serial killings, the neurodivergent cello prodigy Ri-one, or a subplot involving Si-one, Mi-ri’s son from her first marriage, who, with a schoolfriend, steals iPhones from a store owned by the friend’s father.  The latter is also the offensively arrogant would-be buyer of Man-su and Mi-ri’s property when they’re struggling to keep it.  You can’t help but be pleased when they get the better of him.

    Man-su is appointed by Moon Paper to the post vacated by Seon-chul.  His family can afford to keep their house and Ri-one’s cello lessons.  The little girl’s anti-social behaviour is also improved by the return of the golden retrievers, though they’ll need to stop scrabbling around the apple tree under which the bodies of Si-jo and Cheon-sul are buried.  Man-su has less to fear from the dumb police detective duo who decide that Goo Beom-mo may have murdered Si-jo before being killed by A-ra in self-defence.  At Moon Paper, Man-su finds himself the company’s sole human employee, supervising the machines that have taken over all other jobs.  Straight-faced closing images show a forest of trees being felled.  I guess that will enable some viewers to come out of No Other Choice satisfied they’ve been watching a politically serious and responsible parable for our times.

    4 February 2026

    [1]  A time interval that must have some special significance for Park Chan-wook:  the two main parts of the narrative in Decision to Leave are also separated by thirteen months.

    [2]  https://letterboxd.com/journal/park-chan-wook-no-other-choice-interview/

     

  • Sabrina

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Wilder (1954)

    In William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), the film that deservedly made her a star and won her an Oscar, Audrey Hepburn was a princess temporarily disguised as a commoner.  Hepburn’s next picture is in a couple of ways more of the same.  Like Roman Holiday, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina is a romantic comedy (adapted, from Samuel Taylor’s recent stage play Sabrina Fair, by Wilder, Taylor and Ernest Lehman).  And the first part of the story requires Hepburn’s title character to be seen as just an ordinary girl – or, rather, because she’s ordinary, unseen.  Other people on the screen manage to ignore Sabrina without difficulty, though it’s not so easy for the film’s audience.

    Sabrina Fairchild and her widowed father Thomas (John Williams) live over not the shop but the garage, on the Long Island estate of a vastly rich business family, the Larrabees.  Thomas is their chauffeur and looks after the family’s eight cars.  Paterfamilias Oliver Larrabee (Walter Hampden) and his wife (Nella Walker) have two chalk-and-cheese sons.  Linus (Humphrey Bogart) is a workaholic for the Larrabee conglomerate and a bachelor.  David (William Holden) is an idle rich playboy, with three marriages already behind him.  Sabrina, brought up on the estate, has been in love with David for as long as she can remember.  To him, she’s part of the estate furniture.  During a big party at the Larrabee mansion, Sabrina watches David dance and smooch with giggly Gretchen van Horn (Joan Vohs), before he heads for the indoor tennis court with a bottle of champagne and ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ playing in the background.  En route, he almost bumps into spectator Sabrina, smiles and says, as if correcting himself, ‘I thought I heard somebody’.  ‘No, it’s nobody,’ Sabrina murmurs sadly to herself as David goes off, calling out ‘Anyone for tennis?’ to Gretchen.

    To make matters worse, Sabrina is due to leave for Paris next morning, to learn cordon bleu cookery, and doesn’t want to go.  Back in the Fairchilds’ little apartment, she writes a suicide note to her father, then heads for the garage, shuts the doors and starts up all eight car engines.  She’s nearly unconscious from the fumes when Linus happens to arrive and rescues her.  Sabrina reluctantly accepts her fate and goes to Paris.  There, in the kitchens of a martinet culinary instructor (Marcel Hillaire), we see her try to crack an egg and fail to make a soufflé rise.  Two years later, she returns to Long Island, transformed into an elegant, sophisticated young woman, complete with Givenchy (via Edith Head) outfit and French poodle, whom she calls David.  When he catches sight of the grown-up Sabrina, the dog’s human namesake literally doesn’t recognise her; nor, once her son has driven Sabrina back to the estate, does David’s mother.  Within a matter of hours, at the Larrabees’ latest party, David is cheating on his new fiancée, Elizabeth Tyson (Martha Hyer), and all set to embark on the tennis court routine again, this time with Sabrina.  An accident involving champagne glasses stops David in his tracks, so Linus deputises.  His unsmiling face wasn’t the one Sabrina hoped to see but, as things turn out, Linus was once again in the right place at the right time …

    We understand that class prejudice blinded the Larrabees to the loveliness and artless charm of the chauffeur’s daughter pre-Paris – and that Audrey Hepburn’s unignorable beauty is crucial to making the situation funny.  But Sabrina isn’t as funny as it should be.  For a start, the social set-up is a bit puzzling.  Not only is Hepburn inarguably exquisite; John Williams as her father isn’t in the least servantly – he cuts a distinguished figure and is beautifully spoken.  (No trace of the tell-tale vowels that occasionally disturb the accent of another in-service Englishman abroad, the eponymous hero of Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap.)  It’s true that Thomas Fairchild is introduced, in the film’s opening voiceover, as ‘imported from England years ago, together with a new Rolls-Royce … a fine chauffeur of considerable polish’, but his cut-above quality confuses things[1].

    Even though it doesn’t return, that opening voiceover, unmistakably Audrey Hepburn, heralds the film’s motto throughout:  the more of the leading lady, the better.  Hepburn reads in such carefully elocuted tones, making the prologue even longer than it already is, that she might already be Eliza Doolittle rehearsing for the embassy ball.  It’s testimony to her talent and charisma that you don’t get tired of watching and listening to Hepburn – whether she’s feeling sorry for herself, making a cockeyed attempt to end her life, playing comedy with each of her male co-stars, serious in later scenes with Humphrey Bogart, or singing (twice) ‘La vie en rose‘.  She’s always entertaining, often delightful; even so, you’re increasingly conscious that the people behind the film – maybe Paramount, to whom Hepburn was contracted at the time, as much as Billy Wilder – are overworking her appeal.  (They no doubt felt vindicated:  the result was a critical and commercial hit.)

    But Sabrina’s chief defects, major and minor, are in the script.  The minor ones consist of convenient omissions.  What did Thomas Fairchild make of receiving his adored daughter’s suicide note?  How did Sabrina spend her extracurricular time in Paris?  (She’s hardly seen there outside the cooking classes.  I wondered briefly if the other lessons she learns to acquire worldly poise were an instance of Production-Code code at work but evidently not.  Back on Long Island, Sabrina seems meant to be as pure as ever:  her only romance abroad has been with irresistible, life-enhancing Paris itself.)  The major problem is the weakly conceived character of David.  William Holden was Billy Wilder’s go-to actor of the early 1950s, appearing in two of the director’s previous three films, Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Stalag 17 (1953).  It’s understandable, after such successful collaborations, that the pair wanted another.  In Sabrina, Holden looks eager for action and ready to shine again, but, except for some nice bits of physical comedy, he’s wasted.  Until David comes good in the film’s last five minutes – which he does only as a plotting means to an end – he’s little more than an overprivileged jerk.

    This has consequences for more than Holden’s performance.  Humphrey Bogart, more surprisingly cast, is often touching as Linus; there are moments of real emotional connection between him and Audrey Hepburn.  But there’s no question as to which brother Sabrina will end up loving:  it’s obvious halfway through the story that she’ll realise she has grown up blinded to Linus by David’s dazzle, the elder brother as invisible to Sabrina as she once was to the younger brother.  The inevitability of a romcom’s outcome can, of course, be one of its chief charms, but that depends on the film’s creating a semblance of suspense – on the enjoyable agony of things going wrong between the made-for-each-other protagonists, before they finally come right.  That doesn’t happen in Sabrina.  Because there’s no substance to the brothers’ contest, Sabrina’s relationship with Linus feels too drawn out and the Hepburn-Bogart exchanges, well played as they are, pay diminishing returns.

    The permutations of romantic vs business alliances are worked out smoothly, though it’s a pity the denouement ignores Linus’ loyal secretary, Miss McCardle (excellent Ellen Corby).  The Larrabees are pursuing a merger with the Tyson family, who boast ‘the largest holdings in sugar cane in Puerto Rico’:  David tying the knot with Elizabeth Tyson will be a marriage of convenience in more ways than one.  When his younger brother turns his attention to Sabrina, Linus must intervene to ensure the twin mergers go ahead but subsequent events mean that both look doomed as a decisive boardroom meeting gets underway.  Sabrina, meanwhile, is setting sail for Paris:  she thought she’d be heading there with Linus but is travelling miserably alone.  David saves the day by announcing he’ll marry Elizabeth and arranging transport for Linus from the boardroom to Sabrina’s ship.  The Larrabees seal the business and matrimonial deals, while Linus exits the corporate world in favour of personal happiness.  Isn’t it romantic?  Not really because Sabrina itself is such blatantly transactional filmmaking.

    2 February 2026

    [1] According to Google AI overview, the chauffeur ‘is a cultured man through his refined demeanor, his intellectual interests, and his role as a source of wisdom for his daughter’.  An interesting piece by Jeremy Elice (at https://movielifelessons.substack.com/p/movie-life-lessons-sabrina-the-power) explains in greater detail that there’s lots more to Thomas Fairchild than meets the eye and ear.  I can’t believe I missed all this in Wilder’s film and wonder how much AI and Elice are referencing Sydney Pollack’s 1995 remake of Sabrina.

     

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