Lady Vengeance

So has anyone seen this apart from Reynolds? Sun hee? It is very strong indeed, and departs in a couple of ways from Chan-wook Park’s approach to the first two movies in the trilogy. I should say right away that I found ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’ far weaker than ‘Oldboy’ and I was prepared to feel that ‘Lady Vengeance’ was more like the former than the latter. ‘Oldboy’ seemed to move well beyond revenge as a motivation, and the central performance was so strong it carried the movie. Anyway, as one would expect, the cinematography is superb with great use of color (flame red eye shadow, a drop of blood on flour, snow swirling overhead), and some wonderfully composed shots. Park just sets the camera up and has his characters walk around, in and out of the frame. It captures interaction – or rather the way in which characters simply talk past each other – better than having the camera shift from one character to the other (there is probably some technical name for this approach but I don’t know what it is). In one remarkable scene a couple eat dinner silently. The man gets up, brutally pushes the woman onto the table and rapes her. Then he returns to his side of the table and they both begin eating again.
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