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.

As usual, the acting is superb, especially from Yeong ae Lee and the wonderful Min-sik Choi

The violence is almost entirely off screen in this part of the trilogy, especially in the final quarter of the movie when revenge is exacted. SPOILER: unlike earlier parts, vengeance is not meted out solely by Geum-ja Lee. In fact, when it comes time to kill the child abductor, she cannot pull the trigger. The movie leaves open what she might have done at this point. But then she discovers that he has kidnapped and killed four children and she assembles the four grieving families and invites them to participate in vengeance. This section of the film focuses solely on the families as they grapple with fear and rage, and the viewer never sees the acts of violence. They just return from the room where Mr Beak is being kept, covered in blood, and the next person goes in.

I am still not sure what I think about the collective aspect of the vengeance. We have so grown to empathize with Geum-ja Lee’s revenge plan that it is strange when she is sidelined for the last part of the movie. Some of the dialogue as the parents debate what to do seems hollow and implausible. But it is undeniably powerful and – given that we are talking about abducting and killing little children – makes the act(s) of vengeance all the more… perhaps this is the wrong word… tender. It is not cold-blooded, long-planned vengeance, but brief moments of anger and release. In any case, the quite abrupt shift from individual to collective punishment disrupts our expectations and makes the movie far more satisfying (for me anyway) than ‘Mr Vengeance.’ Very good indeed. One question: why was smoke drifting across Geum-ja’s apartment at the end as the Australian foster parents sleep?

11 thoughts on “Lady Vengeance”

  1. we watched this last week–i expect sunhee will have more to say about when she next looks at the blog. some small, disconnected comments from me:

    once again, i have to wonder about the re-titling of these films for global release. apparently, the original korean title is kindly geum-ja or something like that. how this turns into (sympathy for)lady venegeance, i don’t know.

    re plausibility: the plot in general is full of holes. this, unlike the others, seemed pitched more directly as allegory.

    speaking of which:

    i found the movie gripping but didn’t quite know what to make of the last third with the children’s families. the playing of the videotapes of the about-to-die kids seemed terribly sadistic–both for the families and for the audience. is this meant to be a way of implicating us in the originating violence in these films, the revenge for which is usually our aesthetic payoff? are we being punished as well? are we, through the families, being forced to participate in the horrific violence that we normally view from a distance? (is this why the last, collective killing happens off-camera?)

    i was going to say something about the fact that in a sense this is a film about a mother’s revenge for the loss of her child (a standard way of containing women’s violence), but then i remembered that the first film is about a father’s revenge for the loss of his child. i’d have to watch all three in sequence again to see how they thematically echo each other.

    i was glad that the dog was not killed on camera a la the octopus in oldboy. as it is, that scene caused me to lose sympathy for geum-ja. yes, this is my first law of film: if you kill a dog, you are bad.

  2. Reynolds, I didn’t mean to exclude you from giving your reaction to Lady Vengeance. I just know you have seen it. You never actually posted about this part of the trilogy, beyond saying you liked it back in May.

  3. Oh–no, I am stewing over a reaction to all 3. And/or to revenge flicks, as I just got the Kill Bill movies from the library. I will post something brief later today.

  4. I started a response 3 or 4 times, got distracted or just dead-ended. I may say more if/when I get through rewatching some flicks, but–a couple brief comments.

    –I’m fascinated by revenge films, because they fit into a certain narrative dynamic I find very compelling. On the one hand, the revenge plot is simplicity itself, an overheated distillation of one simple causal relation: If X, then Y. You kill my wife? I destroy your family. Revenge films set up the cleanest, clearest, most concise notion of motive, define exactly the desired outcomes, and dispense with plotting to get on with the stuff of violence.

    In the b-movie, bare-knuckle form, revenge films are like slasher films: you set up a sense of cause, then you enjoy the generative possibilities of how to define effect.

    Yet in many (most?) revenge films the plot rarely remains that simple. The unintended consequences, the complex weather patterns emerging from the flap of butterfly wings, are what get us caught up. Ethan Edwards stalking like (in Greil Marcus’ terms) a force of nature suggests the consuming destructiveness of quid and quid and quid (ad nauseam) pro quo. No ‘effect’ will satisfy the cause; no conclusion seems to satiate the desire. The narrative opens up into an abyss. (And thus, I think, we get the moral, ethical heft of many revenge tales.)

    And in the most intriguing examples I can think of, the contradictions of closure/simplicity and openness/confusion are handy vehicles for artists to fuss with the problems of temporal and signifying order in a film narrative. I’m thinking of John Boorman’s Point Blank, Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, Nolan’s Memento, the Kill Bill films, and Park’s sort-of trilogy.

    –Which is very non-specific, but I’m kind of thinking that maybe one way to think about Lady is to sidestep what it actually does in plotting and instead set it into a continuum with Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy to think about how Park’s style erupts or emerges in a manner that seems quite interestingly, maybe even radically dissimilar from film to film. The first film hews most closely to the moral implosions of revenge narratives–using style/structure to suggest the absurdity of its ethical universe, but also to open up the way grief and loss dislocate us from ourselves. Oldboy in what I think Jeff called its baroque style/art design (all those dank, cluttered, claustrophobic interiors), its Oedipal games, its long takes suggests a more inward-focused, psychological endeavor. And Lady seems to me to open up as a religious painting–its opening shots, outside the prison, are like Renaissance tableaux, and we get more than a hint of Christian iconography in following Geum-ja. I’m also very struck by how much tv images matter here–Geum-ja acting out “her” kidnapping and murder prior to the brutal tv images of the children shown to parents–which might suggest a move away from allegory into something more representationally reflexive. (And Park’s short in Three Extremes is explicitly a revenge film about filmmakers and filmmaking. There’s probably something worth playing with there.) I don’t have much more to suggest than that–I need to see them again–but it’s an opening stab at making sense of my bloated claims about revenge.

    –Then again, certain common signs and motifs recur across the films. Problems of speaking, of having or losing voice, of communicating (as Chris carefully illustrates in his initial post above). And illicit, taboo desires also ripple through the films–that the characters reach out for a kind of love outside of ‘moral boundaries’ perhaps suggests a psychological rooting for the violence. (Or vice versa. Something about how desire is a violent force, destroying and consuming others, and self?)

  5. i’m in the middle of a personal chan wook pak movie festival and i feel very inspired and impressed by his style. i watched part of sympathy for mr vengeance last night and, wow, there are scenes in it that are just breathtaking in originality, beauty, sheer inventiveness, and suckerpunchiness. one doesn’t know whether to interpret everything or just let oneself be carried by the power of the images into the weird physical and psychic spaces pak concocts.

    is there anyone in the US/western world who does films like these? is his style unique, east asian, south korean, what?

    the scene of the little girl’s drowning at the river is amazing.

  6. i finished sympathy last night, and it was a hard film to watch. the inevitability of violence. the (literal) dumbness of violence. the moral compulsion of violence (“you are a good boy. you understand why i need to kill you. do you?). which is it? is violence inevitable (because of the animals we are), dumb, or a moral imperative? the current israeli bombings of gaza (or, for that matter, the slew of killing in iraq) — the ideology and rhetoric that surrounds, supports, and justifies them — clearly shows that violence is inevitable, dumb, and morally imperative (to the perpetrators, not objectively, godforbid).

    but then, too, park roots it, here and in oldboy, in the capitalistic system. it’s money that, in both films, initiates the rolling of violence: not having money to live (sympathy) or what money can buy (oldboy). what is striking in oldboy is the banality of Oh Dae-Su’s kafkian nightmare. it is, in fact, not kafkian at all. it’s sordid, run down, low-key, and for sale. it’s all very simple.

    great filmmaking. i would not have seen these had it not been for you guys. i’m happy i did.

  7. lady vengeance seems different from the other two films in an interesting way. the only really violent scene, the only one that doesn’t place any comic distance whatsoever between the execution of the act and the viewer, is the killing of the little dog. yikes. i realize geum-ja had to try the gun, and that she couldn’t very well try it on her daughter, but killing adorable little dogs… on the other hand, i like it whenever our squeamishness at seeing animals killed onscreen is probed. somebody needs to do it.

    i found the scene with the parents and the communal killing comical. geum-ja needs to show them the clips because otherwise they won’t be riled up enough to overcome their resistance to kill. and i thought she decides not to kill mr. baek because it’d be too easy for him to be killed only by her, or, alternately, not fair and democratic enough, given the fact that, as the key ring demonstrates, he’s killed more than once.

    this seems to me the least violent of the three movies. i was grateful for it. sympathy for mr. vengeance, in particular, uses a non-comic violence that i found almost unbearable (when the deaf boy’s achilles’ tendons are cut in the lake… gosh, too much man).

    sympathy is also relentless in that everyone gets it (same as in oldboy). here, geum-ja, her little daughter, and the australian couple are mercifully spared, and the little daughter even has a chance to give poor deranged geum-ja some atonement and love before she (presumably) returns to australia with the older couple.

    i like reynolds’ suggestion of a religious iconography motif. i buy it.

    unlike chris, i didn’t find myself rooting in any way for the executioners and for the fulfillment of the revenge plan. unlike reynolds, i didn’t find it (in this film, unlike the other two) detestable, either. it seems to me that this film neither approves of nor decries revenge.

    this may be because of the sacredness (religious iconography) that femaleness and motherhood in particular add to the revenge motif.

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