A triumph of outcasts

Lee Chang-Dong’s wrenching, high-risk “Oasis” takes its title from a cheap tapestry hanging in a shabby Seoul apartment. It depicts an Indian boy and woman and a baby elephant taking shelter in a tree-shaded spot in a desert and is the only significant decoration in the home of a young woman, Gong-Ju (Moon So-ri), severely disabled by cerebral palsy. In the course of this remarkable film, South Korea’s official Oscar entry, Lee brings together Gong-Ju and a feckless, reckless young man, Hong Jong (Sol Kyung-gu), with a troubled past who, as an outcast himself, is able to see beyond her disability to discover a pretty, intelligent young woman.

Novelist-turned-filmmaker Lee is a director of infinite daring and equal tenderness. The combination allows him to tell a love story between two young people marginalized by family and society that becomes a scorching indictment of the indifference, cruelty and hypocrisy of those institutions as the couple inevitably come into profound conflict with them. “Oasis” is an unforgettable experience from yet another filmmaker who is making the South Korean cinema arguably the most vibrant of any emerging on the international scene today.

“Oasis” screens at the Korean Cultural Center on Sunday. The center has also added Lee’s 1997 debut feature, “Green Fish,” tonight, and his 2000 “Peppermint Candy” on Friday. Both are outstanding, venturesome films of deep feeling and commitment that anticipate “Oasis.” Lee will attend the screening of “Oasis,” which will be followed by a reception, and he will appear with the other films, schedule permitting.

In “Green Fish,” Mak-dong (Han Suk-kyu), a handsome, naive young man, freshly discharged from the army, has a chance encounter with a beautiful woman, Mi-ae (Shim Hye-jin), that will alter the direction of his life. Meanwhile, Mak-dong is shocked to discover a vast series of huge high-rise apartments looming on the edge of his struggling peasant family’s rice paddies.

When Mak-dong and Mi-ae again cross paths in Seoul, she arranges for him to become a driver for her lover (Moon Sung-keun, a suave George Raft type), a gangster and owner of a nightclub where she sings. Lee departs from the familiar noir triangle that would seem to be looming ahead and takes his story into an unpredictable direction rich in implication and resounding in irony.

Sol Kyung-gu of “Oasis” also stars in the electrifying “Peppermint Candy” as a ravaged-looking 40-year-old man inappropriately dressed in a suit and tie for a country picnic, a 20th reunion of a group of small-town factory workers. The celebrants try not to notice his increasingly erratic behavior, which at its climactic point triggers a series of seven flashbacks spanning 20 years in which the man’s disintegration mirrors his country’s turbulent and repressive political and industrial history. Lee, who wrote the screenplay for the landmark “A Single Spark,” a broadside against the brutality and corruption in South Korean society, suggests that his hero is no less responsible for his fate.

The character’s curse is that he is too questioning for his humble station in life as he progresses from sensitive rural youth through a savage rite of passage in the military that leaves him ripe to become a violent cop and then a no-holds-barred entrepreneur. Familiarity with recent South Korean history is undeniably a plus, but this bravura film connects on a timeless personal level.

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Screenings

What: Lee Chang-Dong film series

Where: Korean Cultural Center, 5505 Wilshire Blvd.

When: “Green Fish,” 7 tonight; “Peppermint Candy,” 5 p.m. Friday; “Oasis,” 5 p.m. Sunday

Info: (323) 936-7141