Lady Vengeance

Park Chan-wook completes his trilogy of revenge-themed films in idiosyncratic fashion with Lady Vengeance, a darkly comic exploration of the idea that sometimes, revenge can double as redemption.

This is a strange way to conclude a triptych of films about the nature of vengeance. The first film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, sees all acts of violence as part of one large cycle of revenge. Most people only wrong one another and commit evil acts, Park's film suggests, because someone has in some way wronged them. Characters who desire payback against one another for all kinds of labrynthine reasons eventually deal out retribution yet feel no satisfaction, and instead only perpetuate a series of increasingly brutal, violent conflicts.

The second and best film in Park's trilogy (and career thus far), the epic Oldboy, presents an act of vengeance so elaborate, so surreal and so thoroughly unwarranted, it explodes any notion of morality. The lead character, a mainly-innocent man jailed in a hotel room for 15 years before being released into a hostile world with even more horrors in store, is senselessly brutalized, punished for a relatively minor indiscretion because of the delusional whims of a wealthy and tortured rival.

The film's gory, visceral and grandiose conclusion in the villain's modern glass-encased loft suggests the essential nature of the revenge act - it is a demonstration of power, an encapsulation of the endless, unspoken struggle between the weak and the strong. A man who was once weak, who suffered a bruised ego and a deep-seated feeling of humiliation, seeks to flaunt his newfound power and its attending control over others. What better way to demonstrate your superiority than elaborately seeking remuneration for old, forgotten debts?

And now here's the sleek, flashy Lady Vengeance, an exercize in style about a good-natured, religious ex-convict who plots the demise of her old lover while making peace with the daughter she's never known. The film's gripping, occasionally quite funny, crisp, clever, densely-plotted and impeccably shot, but it's just not quite up to the level of Mr. Vengeance, and it's certainly not as entertaining, clever or intense as Oldboy, still among my favorite films of this current decade.



Can an act of cold-blooded revenge ever be justified? Park sets out in Lady Vengeance to make this case. Right off the bat, you kind of have to take issue with his thought process. Why is it that, in the two films in which male characters take revenge, the act is seen as heartless and morally questionable, whereas a woman taking revenge is seen as righteous, prudent and even matronly? It sounds for a moment like reverse sexism - holding men to an unfair double standard - but it's actually just good old fashioned regular sexism. Women are inherently weaker, so a man who takes advantage of one of them lowers himself to a sub-human level, thus making him a fair target for torture and homicide.

Also, revenge is seen as somehow intertwined with basic female nature. This is nowhere clearer than in a late scene in Lady Vengeace, when a couple is invited to torture a man who has killed their child. The man wants no part in it, thinking that causing this man pain will only make his own pain worse, but his wife insists on taking part. Her motherly instinct drives her to commit depraved acts, and Park seems to find this acceptable in some way. Well, she's a woman and a mother so she's not in control of what she's doing.

This critique, though I think it's fair, doesn't really represent the full scope of Park's film. Like Kill Bill, it's also in some ways about creating the ultimate Female Pop Culture Icon of Tough Yet Sexy Cool. Everything from Geum-ja Lee's (Yeong-ae Lee) red eyeliner, which she wears because she's tired of looking friendly and good natured, to her leather jacket to her tastefully bandaged finger to her antique dual-barrel revolver has been designed to catch the eye and look slick on camera. It works sometimes, in a self-conscious way, but also dates the film and gives it a generic quality that's highly disappointing for a filmmaker as thoughtful and distinctive as Park.

Honestly, there have probably been 20 films so far this year with cool, sexy leather-clad tough grrrls kicking ass in a heavily-stylized manner filmed with breakneck editing and oversatured color. Did we really need one more?

As in Oldboy, Park makes the initial half-hour of the film purposefully disorienting, putting the audience in a victimized state of mind. Startling acts of violence occur without any coherent sequence. Jump cuts present a skewed or incomplete version of past and present events. Explanations are provided through voice-over narration but don't seem to synch up into a single unifying narrative. The technique works brilliantly in the former film, providing nothing but a lone point of view, without any context, before instigating a complex plot filled with double-crosses and sudden revelations.

In Lady Vengeance, the entire opening hour serves as little more than a sporadically amusing diversion, linking up to the far-superior second half exclusively through a cheap, tacked-on narrative device. At 19, Geum-ja Lee is arrested for the kidnapping and brutal murder of a 5 year old boy she did not even know. She confesses to the heinous crime and is sent to prison for 14 years. Once inside, she meets a variety of other convicts, whose back stories all play out in fanciful set pieces eerily reminiscent of (I swear) Wes Anderson films.

For real. You get bouncy classical music, elegant tracking shots, split screen effects, inserts of handwritten letters on cutesy personal stationary, even freeze-frame shots with characters looking directly into the camera with captions underneath them giving you their name and the length of their prison sentence. Wes can't ever make a Women in Prison movie because Park's stolen his thunder here.

It's clear he's trying to take the series in a more fanciful, imaginitive direction with a more elaborate visual palette, but some of these flourishes just don't make a lot of sense or fit in with the rest of the movie. In addition to Anderson, some moments are clearly influenced by French fantasist Jean-Pierre Jeunet, particularly a scene in which one of Lee's fellow inmates sees her face lit up with an irridescent glow. (Another shot, where we see the outside of an office building before swooping in through the window to spot an executive behind a desk, serves no purpose other than showmanship. "Hey, look! We got CGI over here! Check me out!") Oldboy was accused of being overly Western and MTV-influenced, but at least all of its stylish diversions nominally attempted to enhance the storytelling in some way rather than simply impress the viewer through expensive trickery.

Once all the prison material has been dispensed with and Park actually goes about telling the revenge story, things improve significantly. Just as Dae-Su Oh's (Min-Sik Choi) mysterious imprisonment left him a monster with little connection to his previous self in Oldboy, an initial act of violent retribution on behalf of her fellow inmates proves damaging to Lee's psyche and her conscience. She no longer feels secure in her salvation as a good Christian, even though her "crime" was well-intentioned, in the service of her friends. This provides the moral conflict at the center of her story - suffering from guilt for her sins even as she must plan an even more outsized and gruesome act of bloody violence.

Within Lee's dilemma, we find the thread that runs through all three films. These characters believe that acting out their revenge fantasies will magically right the wrongs of the past. If not to actually turn back the clock, bringing loved ones back to life and such, they want to correct mistakes for posterity, to reset the universe's memory of how things played out. Unlike the heroes of Mr. Vengeance or Oldboy, who knowingly seek revenge for their own personal edification, Lee comes to see her quest as redemptive in the strictly religious sense. Getting satisfaction for herself and her enemies' other victims, even at the risk of her own suffering, will prove her devotion to God and Goodness and purity, will wipe her soul clean and allow her to start anew. (The frequently-invoked symbol of smooth, white tofu continually reiterates this point, too plainly in the film's largely unneccessary final scene.)

14 years before, Lee had not acted alone, and now that she is freed, the decision to get back at the old teacher whom she holds responsible (Choi from Oldboy) seems intractible. She speaks frequently about the intricate "plan" she's been working on for all her time in prison, but actually there's not that much strategy involved. Certainly nothing on the scale of the villain's meticulous work in Oldboy. Surprisingly from Park, the conclusion's violence is muted, possibly in deference to the entire film's overall lighter tone. (Well, most of the film. It gets heavy towards the very end.) In fact, the most disturbing scene doesn't include a single act of violence. A group must clean up a warehouse after coating the floors and themselves with blood, an ideal visual metaphor for the grisly and ultimately unsatisfying aftermath to the revenge act.

These final few scenes are so good, it almost makes the mediocre stuff that came before feel permissable. Park casts a nearly-silent cameo role of great importance with actor Ji-tae Yu who played the demented and anguished villain in Oldboy. The connection is clear - the perpetrator who saw himself as a victim in that film has become the despondant victim of this film, wishing for an opportunity at revenge that can never come. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

Unfortunately, you have to wade through an hour that's only so-so to get there. I'd say it's worth the wait, but it's the only film in this collection where that's even debatable. All in all, this is definitely a step down from Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy. Too bad.