Boasting a corporate jargon title associated with evading responsibility, Park Chan-wook’s anti-capitalist parable No Other Choice might feel too real to those burned by modern employment.
Based on Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax and written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Don McKellar, the film provides biting social commentary by asking the question: Is killing for the role you want a morally sound choice in this economy?
Mashable UK Editor Shannon Connellan sat down with Park and No Other Choice star Lee Byung-hun to discuss the film’s skewering of the hyper competitive job market.
“We all live in the capitalist system, we all comply to it, and we’re all trying very hard to survive in it as well. And we don’t often question the system itself,” Park told Mashable. “But when we do come upon the question of ‘what if we could live in a different situation?’ it leads to a very tricky state where you’re considering ideas of getting rid of the system, or we’re brainstorming ideas to take action to destroy the system. It’s a very difficult state to be in.
“Regardless, in order to maintain the system, we still need to question the system as well. So in the film, I didn’t want to make it too theoretical. I wanted to follow the individual and through that process, lead the audience to ask themselves their own questions about the system.”
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Said individual in No Other Choice is paper company employee Yoo Man-soo (Lee), who loses his job in a cruel company restructure. With his family to provide for, including his wife Mi-ri (Crash Landing on You‘s Son Ye-jin) and two kids, Man-soo scrambles to find work — and when an opportunity arises, he takes drastic measures.
Lee Byung-hun in “No Other Choice.”
Credit: BFI London Film Festival
“When [Park] approached me to say, ‘let’s tell the story together,’ I really enjoyed the message [of the film] and the questioning. I found it very meaningful to tell as an actor,” Lee told Mashable. “To play this very ordinary man, a family man who faces a very tragic reality, and is scrambling desperately to make things work, and eventually ends up making this very extreme decision.”
Notably, the film makes a modern nightmare out of the job interview, as Man-soo faces the dreaded, often dehumanising process in his search for work.
“I guess I haven’t gone on a lot of job interviews, personally, but I have been in many instances in which I have to evaluate actors for auditions, so I’ve seen how nervous people are when they are in the state of getting evaluated,” said Park. “In addition, earlier in my career, I had a lot of meetings with producers to pitch my stories to them, which is also like an interview. So because I’ve been on both sides of a so-called interview, I know how difficult it is to be in that situation.
“Especially as an Asian, we are always taught to be humble, and humility is considered a very important trait in our lives. So to be in a situation where you have to sell yourself and hide your weakness while also being humble, it’s even harder, which I think is especially harder for us in Eastern culture more than people in the West.”
Watch the full interview above. No Other Choice is now in cinemas.
