The Vengeance Trilogy

I'm kind of in the dark when it comes to most Asian cinema. I've seen the films that have broken through to American audiences, such as those by Kurosawa or Ang Lee, but I haven't seen much of the genre stuff, such as martial arts or horror pictures. I was urged to see a trilogy of films by South Korean director Chan Wook Park which, though not connected by characters, are all unified by the overriding theme of vengeance, and are marked by an over abundance of both style and violence.

The first film I saw (though apparently not the first one made) was Oldboy. It concerns a typical businessman who has been mysteriously imprisoned for fifteen years. He does not know who has imprisoned him or why. He is diligently kept alive, and somehow manages to maintain his sanity. He is then released, and tries to find out who did this to him and why.

Min-Sik Choi plays the man, and he is very good, but Park's stylistic flourishes really were over the top. This kind of cinema is reminiscent of Tarantino, with some brilliant flashes of droll humor, but in the end I was kind of worn out. There is one scene in which Choi battles about two dozen men and manages to defeat them all. Now, in Tarantino's Kill Bill, there was a scene like that with Uma Thurman dispatching about fifty assailants. That was filmed in ridiculous surrealism, but this scene is handled realistically, but at the same time I was incredulous. I was also bothered by the villain of the piece, who is supposed to be a schoolmate of Choi's but looked about twenty years younger.

The next film I saw was Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. Here the theme of vengeance is more complicated. A young deaf-mute sells his kidney in an attempt to get money for his sister's operation. But he's screwed in the deal, so he and his anarchist girlfriend kidnap a rich guy's daughter for the ransom. The girl ends up dying accidentally, so her father comes after the kidnappers. Thus we have two elements of vengeance--the deaf-mute's against the black market organ dealers, and the rich man's against the kidnappers. I liked the multi-faceted storyline, but again some of the stylistic issues weighted it down. The film was almost half over before I could piece together who was who and what exactly was going on.

My favorite of the films was Lady Vengeance (or Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). A young woman has spent thirteen years in jail for kidnapping and murdering a child. When she comes out she rounds up some of her fellow inmates and plots revenge on the man who actually killed the child (Choi again). When revenge is within her grasp, she decides not to exact it herself but do something more selfless. Maybe I had grown accustomed to Park's quirks by the third film, or maybe I responded more to the "wrong man" plot element, but I found this film compelling from start to finish, and especially liked the scene in which a group of normal people are faced with a choice of how to dispense justice. The title role is well-played by Yeong-ae Lee.

It was nice to see some work from a different culture (although Park clearly has his Hollywood inspirations) but for a film to tolerate so much goofiness and bizarre camera angles it has to be very strong, and these films were a mixed bag. Or maybe they just required a conditioning on my part.