Actors portraying mentally challenged characters get a bad rap; this is because their performances, no matter how nuanced and realistic they may be, are only as good as the movies they're in, and those movies seem to always end up leaning towards the realms of Oscar-baiting sentimentality. Think I Am Sam, The Other Sister, etc. In the other, infrequently visited corner, you have Leonardo DiCaprio in Lasse Halstrom's What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and now Moon So-ri in Lee Chang Dong's Oasis, which takes a scenario ripe for cheesiness and turns it into an extraordinary and troubling love story that alternates between joy and hopelessness with such finesse that I was never quite sure which emotion I was feeling while I watched it.

So-ri is not a big name in Korean cinema, and will be completely unknown on these shores; audiences will be shocked to realize that in real life, she does not have cerebral palsy, and that her performance is indeed a performance. She's transformed her body into a rigid lump of twitches and spasms; she can barely thrust a single syllable through her lips. Her eyes flash with fury and frustration, endlessly overloaded with everything she can't express through normal means.

Less transformed but equally skillful is her counterpart on screen, Sol Kyung-gu , who plays a character whose mental capacities are hindered in a different sort of way. The film begins with Kyong-gu's character, Hong Jong-Du, being released from prison. He bounces up and down on his heels while waiting for the bus to take him home, pestering people for cigarettes. When asked about his imprisonment, he candidly admits that he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, after a fatal drunk driving accident; prior to that, he'd been arrested for a whole slew of offenses, including attempted rape. When he arrives home, the welcome he receives is a wary one; his parents, unsure of how to deal with him, seem to wish he hadn't come home at all.

It doesn't take too long to recognize that Hong's not working with a full deck; his physical capacities are intact, but he acts with the manner of an impudent 12 year old. A lazy smirk is constantly plastered on his face, and he seems to delight in annoying everyone around him. At one point, he comes across a film crew shooting a movie and repeatedly ruins their shot, riding his motorcycle past them and shouting at the camera. This is where the delicacy of Kong-Gu's performance comes in, because while Han himself is almost unbearably obnoxious and shallow, there's depth to his vapidity that keeps us watching. And his actions surprise us: one of the first things he does is bring flowers to the family of the man he killed. That's where he first sees Han (So-ri); she's the man's daughter, and she lives alone in an apartment, visited intermittently by a brother who spends her disability pension on his own family.

He's fascinated by his first glimpses of Han, and he returns to the apartment again, when she's alone. In a scene of profound discomfort for the audience, he attempts to rape her.

Now, any rape scene is going to be uncomfortable if there's empathy for the victims, and that's certainly true in this case. This scene, however, is difficult to watch on an additional and entirely different level. Acknowledgment of sexuality in handicapped people is rare, and to see Han as not only an object but a victim of lust, and to see her use every capacity she has to resist it, completely removes us from the comfortable boundaries with which we're used to dealing with mental illness. Hong ends up not going through with the rape, but by that point it doesn't quite matter; the violation has already occurred.

After this crucial point, without a single false step, Dong executes an incredibly difficult and unexpected narrative maneuver. Han discovers that Hong left phone number in her room after the attack, and one night she forces her fingers to operate the telephone; she invites him back to her apartment, and almost immediately we realize that the rape, while terrifying, must have been the first time Han had ever been treated as anything but (at best) an object of pity. Hong is overjoyed at her acceptance of him, and flatters her with compliments. He tells her she's beautiful, that she's a princess, and he means every word of it. He knows she's handicapped, it seems, but is just simple enough to not see any problem with that.

I'm not ruining anything by saying that neither have any false intentions, or that Hong never has any sort of tragic regression to violence in the third act; as it turns out, he's harmless when he has a focus to his energies, and Han provides that for him. He in turn provides her with human contact and warmth, and esteem; he takes her out in public, ignorant of the stares they get. She's smarter than he is and understands her circumstances, and she recognizes what he has to offer and is glad to accept it. Neither of them are innocents, but their love is pure.

Regardless, their romance cannot end well. We know this for the same reason we were uncomfortable during the rape scene; society demands that disabled people be treated with kid gloves, and because Hong is ignorant of this, because he's seen by others as a criminal while Han is viewed as incapable of making decisions for herself, their love will not be permitted. We're privy to their private moments and know the good they do each other, but if we were in the position of Han's family, would our reaction to the relationship be any different? Dong constantly underscores the joy of the burgeoning lovers with the rejection they inherently face in society.

In a way, the film is similar to other stories of lovers standing in the face of social stigma; interacial romance would have once been as taboo, or homosexual relationships. This is slightly different, because there are certainly many mentally handicapped people not fit to be independent, but on that level, Oasis is not so much a demonstration of what they're capable of as it is an indictment of society's incapability to treat them as anything other than victims of nature.

I mentioned that the audience will be shocked to learn that Son-yi is not actually handicapped; this revelation occurs during the film itself, in beautifully staged fantasy sequences in which Han springs from her wheelchair and dances around Hong with all the liveliness and personality that has until this point been confined solely to what she can express with her eyes; so perfect is Son-yi's performance that character is instantly recognizable in this form, and when she returns to the wheelchair, we realize that this wasn't a fantasy; we were simply seeing her through Hong's eyes. Having to return to our own point of view is heartbreaking.