A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, June 19, 2017

Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005)

Lee Yeong-ae  in Lady Vengeance
Geum-ja Lee: Lee Yeong-ae
Mr. Baek: Choi Min-sik
Geun-shik: Kim Shi-hoo
Jenny: Kwan Yea-young

Director: Park Chan-wook
Screenplay: Jeung Seo-kyeong, Park Chan-wook
Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoon
Production design: Jo Hwa-seong
Music: Choi Seung-hyun

Watched on Filmstruck

The plot of Lady Vengeance is at least as complicated and implausible as that of Park's Oldboy (2003), the film that precedes it in Park's "vengeance trilogy" that began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), and it's made with the same attention to style. But the way it's worked out on screen though flashback dribbles of exposition feels needlessly complicated, and the culminating act of vengeance on the part of the families of the victims doesn't have the presumably intended emotional impact because it's spread out over too long a stretch. As a teenager, Geum-ja had become pregnant and, afraid to tell her parents, went to her teacher, Mr. Baek, for advice. He took her in and not only made her a sex slave but also enlisted her in his scheme to kidnap small children and hold them for ransom. She lured a 5-year-old boy, Won-mo, into Mr. Baek's clutches, and when the boy was accidentally killed, Mr. Baek forced Geum-ja to confess to the crime by threatening to kill her own child, a daughter, who was put up for adoption after Geum-ja's conviction. Released from prison after 13 years because she convinced the authorities that she had thoroughly reformed, Geum-ja sets out to take revenge on Mr. Baek. We learn that despite her apparently angelic behavior in prison, she actually bumped off some of the more repulsive inmates, causing one to take a fatal fall on a slippery floor and slowly poisoning another, thereby gaining  the enduring support of her fellow prisoners. She calls in the favors she earned from some of these now released inmates so that she has the wherewithal to exact her revenge on the psychotic Mr. Baek, who has evolved into a serial killer of small children. The revenge, however, is anything but swift. The subplot involving Geum-ja's daughter, now called Jenny by her adoptive Australian parents, feels extraneous, as does Geum-ja's affair with a young man who is the exact age that Won-mo would have been if he had lived. I suppose Park has a thematic point about the corruption of innocence that he wants to make, but it isn't integrated into the rest of the film very well. As a commentary on the nature of revenge, Lady Vengeance doesn't have the resonance of Oldboy, and despite some imaginatively nightmarish scenes it seems like a mostly empty exercise in film technique.


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