Dir. Park Chan-Wook, South Korea, 2005, 112 mins, subtitles
Cast: Lee Young-Ae, Choi Min-Sik, Tony Barry
Review by Gus Alvarez
This latest, eagerly anticipated blast of ultra stylish cinema from South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, is as deliriously inventive, blood-soaked and beautiful as we have come to expect from the director of Oldboy, and completes the so-called ‘Revenge’ trilogy which began with 2002’s Sympathy For Mr Vengeance. This new film proves to be as iconoclastic and nerve jangling as the other parts of the triptych, but introduces a new strain of hope and redemption amongst the murder and the mayhem.
Guem-ja (Lee Young-Ae) is the vengeful lady of the title. Wrongfully jailed at nineteen for the notorious abduction and murder of a six-year old boy, she is released from a thirteen-year jail sentence, seemingly a reformed character. Met at the prison gates by a bizarre group of Christians, dressed as Santa and bearing tofu (a gift to represent her clean slate and fresh start), Guem-ja is icily implacable. She refuses the tofu they and sets into action her long planned, terrible vengeance on the man responsible for putting her there.
So begins a dizzyingly intricate series of flashbacks, offering whirlwind recaps of Guem-ja’s thirteen-year jail term. A model prisoner who formed close bonds with her fellow inmates, her motives and methods are eventually laid bare, and the true villain of the piece emerges. As the object of her serene fury, Choi Min-Sik (the star of Oldboy) gives a chilling performance, a terrifying bogeyman, a vicious and callous wolf in sheep’s clothing. But as Guem-ja’s fiendishly elaborate plot is overtaken by communal retribution, we are forced to consider the soul-destroying nature of revenge, and to question the possibility of redemption.
In Lady Vengeance, Park Chan-Wook has created an incredibly dynamic piece of cinema, an extraordinary synthesis of, design, music and cinematography. Transitions back and forward in time are cunningly executed, and an organic, mosaic-like narrative emerges.
With startling technique, Park’s baroque melodrama combines extreme violence with a strong strain of absurdist humour. One scene near the end in which a Guem-ja assembles the parents of murdered children and offers them the chance of taking their revenge, is almost unbearable in its emotional intensity (the fact that Park chooses to stage the scene in a classroom twists the knife even further.) Yet the blackly comic scene that immediately follows it immediately undercuts this genuinely disturbing set-up. For Park, there is always a sardonic undercurrent, no matter how bleak things get.
Familiar themes of imprisonment, kidnap, and the loss or betrayal of children tie this film to the previous instalments of the trilogy, but the main departure in Lady Vengeance is the foregrounding of the female character, and the Christian iconography that is playfully laced throughout. After the bleak endings of his previous two films, Park even offers the possibility of redemption at the films close, as a cleansing flurry of snow falls. Bizarre, brutal and beautiful, the ambition and technique of this film far out-strips anything coming out of recent Western Cinema.
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