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by Leonard Heldreth

Korean trilogy creates buzz in film world
Korean films recently have generated a lot of buzz in the international film community. Kim Ki-Duk’s films—Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring... and 3-Iron—have been discussed in these pages, but the most famous of current Korean directors, Park Chan-wook, has not been mentioned before.
All of the films in his “vengeance” trilogy are now available on DVDs, so it’s time to examine more closely this original but controversial director.
The trilogy is made up of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2006), and the films are connected only by common themes—the futility of vengeance and the need for a rebirth of the individual who carries out the revenge.
Chan-wook has said in interviews that an overwhelming desire for revenge transforms a person into a different individual, but when the revenge is achieved, that new person dies (the sole purpose for living is achieved) and the individual must create a new personality and a new life if he or she is to continue.
In Mr. Vengeance, most of the main characters are literally dead at the end, so no psychic rebirth is possible. In Oldboy, the main character achieves a kind of catharsis at the end, but his future life looks as bleak as the dark woods and falling snow in which he stands. Only in Lady Vengeance does the main character seem likely to create a new life for herself.
Despite their differences in style and resolution, the films share many common characteristics. The plots usually turn upon the kidnapping of children or adults or both, the strong emotions between parents and children provide the motivations for many of the actions, and all depend upon people turning revenge into an obsession.
All of the films have an unrealistic or supernatural scene, which might be explained as a hallucination, except that more than one person sees it. All are quite violent, although the violence decreases and becomes more formalized as the trilogy progresses.
All have tragic qualities, although, as the director points out, each film has a visually distinctive style. Several actors appear in more than one of the films, for like most major directors, Chan-wook has identified a group of film artists with whom he is comfortable and calls on them when he starts a new film.

 

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Chan-wook’s first feature film was Joint Security Area, a thriller set in the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, and he followed that with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), although this film was not released in the United States until after the success of Oldboy (2003).
Since more than one person is seeking vengeance in the film, the identity of Mr. Vengeance is ambiguous, even after the film is over. The visual style is what Park calls “hardboiled,” a brightly-colored, fast-paced narrative showing a realistic, contemporary setting.
Two major plots and at least two subplots produce a tightly structured film that must be followed carefully. Green-haired deaf-mute Ryu (Shin Ha-gyun) was an aspiring artist until economic necessity forced him to drop out of school and work at a factory job to care for his older sister (Im Ji-eun ), whose kidneys are failing. Ryu has volunteered one of his own kidneys, but the blood type is wrong.
Ryu has saved the $20,000 the kidney transplant will cost, no donor is available and the sister has only a few weeks to live. Desperate, he tries to buy one on the black market in exchange for the $20,000 and one of his kidneys, but he is swindled and awakens naked in a field with no money and one less kidney. Then, the hospital finds a donor, but he now has no money for the operation. His desire for vengeance on the organ dealers is one of the driving forces of the film.
Desperate to help his sister, Ryu and his girlfriend decide to kidnap the daughter of Park Dong- jin (Song Kang-ho), the industrialist who fired him while he was recovering from the ordeal with the organ swindlers. They rationalize that their kidnapping will be a good one, where the ransom is paid with no hardship on the victim and the returned child will now be loved more than ever.
The kidnapping is so successful that the child thinks she is merely staying with friends for a few days, and the father easily raises the money. But then bad luck, fate and wrong decisions accumulate, and Park, the industrialist, embarks on his own quest for vengeance.
The rest of the film shows how Ryu deals with the organ dealers, how Park tracks down Ryu and his girlfriend, and how the inevitable carnage occurs.
Each step the characters take, consciously or unwittingly, takes them further toward the concluding blood bath. This film, like all of the vengeance trilogy, is tragic, the body count approaches that of Hamlet and much of the violence occurs on stage.
Almost all of the characters are caught up in forces beyond their control. Peng, a former employee with a large family who also has been laid off, confronts Dong-jin in the street before his home and slashes himself in a symbolic suicide. This action and his later ones reinforce the desperation Ryu feels in his confrontations with the medical system and the organ dealers.
One of the police officers who becomes involved in the kidnapping also has a daughter who needs a kidney transplant, but has no idea how he will find the money. These are desperate people in desperate situations, and if they err, their errors are understandable. The acting is excellent throughout, and even the four punks in the apartment next to Ryu’s turn out to have more significance than originally thought.
The biggest problem most reviewers had with the film, beyond its violence, was that the characters were not divided clearly into the good guys, with whom they could identify, and the bad guys, whom they could enjoy seeing destroyed. This objection is valid, but should be seen as a positive aspect of the film—the characters are not one-dimensional figures, but complex characters, good people who do bad things under extreme circumstances. Who should viewers root for in King Lear or Macbeth?
The question that Chan-wook wants each viewer to ask is not, “Who should I root for?” but “How would I have reacted under these circumstances? Would I have been able to overcome the desire for revenge with this provocation?”
The film has some weaknesses—the autopsy scenes seem unnecessary, as does the view of a decaying corpse and the peek inside the coffin during a cremation scene. The scene also may be unnecessary in which a drowned character appears in the apartment of another character and leaves a puddle of water.
And reasonable viewers undoubtedly will disagree over the degree and explicitness of the brutal violence with which people are dispatched, especially a torture scene with an electrical connection. Despite these weaknesses and the violent conclusion, the tragic power of the film and its catharsis are undeniable. Top

Oldboy
The second film in the trilogy, Oldboy, is set in a style that Chan-wook calls “mythic,” and his label is as justified as any. The film is reminiscent of the Jacobean “blood tragedies,” such as The White Devil, by writers such as Ford and Webster. The actual source of the film, however, is a Japanese comic book.
Little beyond the initial situation can be discussed without giving away too much of a plot that depends on a revelation near the end. Oh Daesu (Choi Min-sik) becomes drunk and unruly one evening and is taken to the police station.
He is released to a friend’s care, but while the friend makes a phone call, Daesu disappears. He has been kidnapped and is confined in a private prison in an apartment complex. He finds out from the television that his wife has been killed and that he is wanted for the murder.
For fifteen years, he rages against his captors, watches television, keeps in shape by practicing martial arts and regularly is put to sleep by gas piped into the room.
After fifteen years, he is released with no explanation, and he sets out to find and take vengeance on his captors. He becomes friends with Mido (Gang Hye-jung), a cute young chef who takes pity on him and becomes his lover, and he tracks down the place where he was confined.
But then Mido is captured by his original abductor, Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), and Daesu is given five days to come up with the answers to why he was captured and confined for fifteen years or Mido will die.
The rest of the film shows how Daesu finds the answers to the questions posed to him, answers that he ultimately wishes he had not found, and how he takes his vengeance and finds it unsatisfying. The ending finds Daesu standing in a dark pine forest with snow falling about him, a visual image of the isolation, despair, and ultimate resolution that he has achieved.
The acting is excellent in all respects and, as usual, Chan-wook creates a number of set pieces. In one virtuoso scene, whose composition references its comic origin, Daesu, using a hammer, fights several men up and down a hall in one long take.
The film also has enough explicit violence to offend many critics—a hand and another body part are severed, a man bites the head off a small octopus served to him, and blood flows freely in the fight scenes.
Despite these objections, the film is a powerful and ultimately moving experience. Daesu’s feelings for Mido humanize the violence he exhibits in his quest for revenge.
The film has been compared, accurately I think, to some of the great Russian novels. It’s violent and occasionally bloody and probes the human psyche. The complex plot, fine acting, strong feelings and visual artistry make it impossible to stop watching the film.
Oldboy won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as a number of lesser awards, and identified Chan-wook as a major new director in world cinema. Oldboy may be his finest work so far. Top

Lady Vengeance
The third film, released in the United States as Lady Vengeance but released elsewhere as Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, is a slower, more meditative film than the first two. It offers the effects of revenge as seen by a female protagonist and includes revenge seen from several other viewpoints. It’s a visually darker film that offsets the bright colors and scenes of Mr. Vengeance and picks up the tonal palette of the last part of Oldboy.
Lady Vengeance has four main plot movements. The first shows the release of Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) from prison after thirteen years of confinement for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy. During this time, she had been a model prisoner, taking care of other prisoners and even donating a kidney for a woman who otherwise would have died. More important, however, she was accumulating a long list of favors that she begins to collect as soon as she exits the prison gate.
Renouncing the good persona she had used in prison, she dons blood-red eye shadow and sets out on her journey of revenge against the man who kidnaped and held her daughter hostage until Lee falsely confessed to killing the boy. She calls in the favors to achieve her goals—getting a job, getting better clothes, getting a gun, finding out where her daughter is now and locating the object of her revenge, Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik, the hero of Oldboy).
The second part of the plot shows her journey to Australia to find her daughter, who has been adopted by an Australian couple. This surrealistic section is played for humor, as she speaks no English and the daughter and adopted parents speak no Korean.
Back in Korea, she tracks down Mr. Baek and kidnaps him, finding out that his crimes are much greater than she had realized. She invites the victims of these crimes—the relatives of other children he had kidnapped and killed for ransom—to join her in extracting revenge, and the resulting scene is similar to a scene in Murder on the Orient Express, except much extended and bloodier.
The conclusion of the plot finds the relatives joining her at the pastry shop where she works. There, they eat cake to celebrate their accomplishment before they disperse as dawn begins to break.
The last scene, to which many critics objected, finds her in an alley with her daughter as snow begins to fall. She urges her daughter to stay clean and buries her face in the white cake she is carrying, symbolizing an end to the persona of “Lady Vengeance” and the start of a new life with the daughter.
Chan-wook describes the style of the film as “fairy tale,” and it has the brooding, dark qualities and methodical development of the Brothers Grimm. The dark woods, the falling snow, the scenes of confinement and the abandoned buildings are further developments of visual patterns from Oldboy, as is the humor with the Australian couple (they all get drunk) and her friend who brings her clothes when she leaves prison–she asks, “Don’t you have any high heels?”
The film has several memorable visual sequences. A two-shot gun, accurate only at very close range, is created from a design given to her in prison because “things should be beautiful.” In a dream sequence she walks across a frozen field pulling a sled with a box on it, and in the box is a dog with Mr. Baek’s head.
When revenge is extracted upon Mr. Baek, she wears her coat buttoned to just below her eyes to indicate her role as an observer. Also included, and thematically more relevant, are two or three shots of the ghost of the boy she is accused of murdering. In the last one, in which he is a teenager, he walks away, clearly indicating his displeasure with her quest for revenge.
Some reviewers felt the film could have been faster, but the slower pace of the film gives the audience time to evaluate what it is seeing and is, for this viewer, entirely appropriate. The only part that might have been cut was a gratuitous scene in which a dog is shot off-camera. Lady Vengeance is a different but no less successful film than its predecessors in the trilogy.
Chan-wook’s three films on revenge are not for everyone. They are disturbingly violent sometimes, the plots are complicated and the resolutions all point to the same ending: vengeance is a dish better not eaten at all. Like the tragedies of Shakespeare and other dramatists, they explore the darker side of the human heart, but they stretch our perceptions in ways that lesser films do not. That is what art is all about. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed should be available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

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