Mubi Monday: Lady Vengeance (2005)

The last instalment of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, Lady Vengeance is a deceptively light tale that leads to a finale that allows viewers to question what vengeance really brings, be it closure, catharsis, guilt, dissatisfaction, or any other number of feelings.

Lee Young-ae plays Lee Geum-ja, a young woman who is released from prison at the start of the film. She has served a 13-year sentence for the kidnap and murder of a small boy, and throughout that time she has been coming up with a grand plan and building up a store of favours. Because, as becomes clear quite early on, she wasn't the person responsible for the horrific crime. Despite confessing to it.

The first script collaboration between Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong, Lady Vengeance is a well-constructed piece of work that skirts close to being a mystery before showing you all of the cards quite early on. You have questions during the opening act, those are answered during the middle section, and the third act sets everything out, as our lead does for other characters, and shows a stark choice to be made, one that will reverberate through the lives of others for many years to come.

Although there are many interesting supporting characters here, with one of the most memorable being a spiteful and abusive prisoner named "The Witch" (played by Go Soo-hee), Lady Vengeance never loses focus of the main characters. You have Lee Geum-ja, Detective Choi (Nam Il-woo), who was never convinced of her guilt, and Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik, returning for a smaller, but no less vital, role after his peerless turn in Oldboy).

What Chan-wook and Seo-kyeong do so well is the detailing and forward momentum of the script. Even as you perhaps have to play a bit of catch up, reminding yourself of who various characters are between the present and the past, there's a narration to help, as well as various signifiers telling you what plot point any particular sequence is revolving around. Whether it's a dream sequence, a memory, or simply a scene showing you something happening that seems out of the blue, there's always enough within the frame to stop viewers getting totally lost.

Young-ae is a great protagonist, she is a perfect mix of sweet, innocent, scheming, and absolute ruthlessness. Il-woo is a nice addition to the core group, showing how frustrating it must be to go along with a majority verdict while you have no concrete evidence to back up your own feeling on the matter. And then you have Min-sik, being horrible, and doing so well at it. Kim Si-hoo also deserves a mention, playing Geun-shik, a young man who would have been about the same age as the murdered child, and a co-worker that is drawn into a relationship with our lead.

The previous two instalments showed how vengeance affects individuals, in a way, while this shows how it can bond together a group of people, for better or worse. It remains a lighter look at things, compared to the other movies, but that's down to the deceptive direction from Chan-wook, who uses every trick in the book to keep you entertained and enthralled throughout, with the exception of one or two moments that stop things and turn your face to look directly at the consequences of what is being done. And that is the brilliance of this final instalment of what is an unmissable cinematic trilogy.

8/10

This is a set you may want to pick up.

Mubi Monday: Oldboy (2003)

The second (and many would rate it as the best) instalment of  Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, Oldboy is a film I deliberately haven't revisited in many years. I was always waiting for the right time, and I always wanted to watch it as part of the trilogy, compared to my first viewing, when I was blown away by the film, then saw Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance some time later, and eventually saw Lady Vengeance when that was released later.

Choi Min-sik plays Oh Dae-su, a man who is snatched off the street and imprisoned in a room for fifteen years. He doesn't know who his captor is, nor does he know why he was chosen for the punishment. When he is released, again without any explanation, he sets out to find out who was responsible for taking such a large chunk of his life from him. On the plus side, he meets and falls in love with a young woman named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung). On the downside, he sets off on a path of revenge that may not lead to the resolution he wants. It may, in fact, lead to a realisation that his time alone in that room was only part of his punishment.

Oldboy is a film with a few amazing set-pieces helping to make it unforgettable. If you've not seen the film already then you've still probably heard about moments from it, be it the eating of a live octopus, the dental trauma, the astonishing corridor fight between a number of men and a hammer-wielding Min-sik, or even the details of the ending (I would never discuss such things, but you may have read or heard something spoilerific by now, especially if you're a fan of Asian cinema). Thankfully, the film doesn't JUST rely on those moments. Based on a manga of the same name, and adapted into film form by Chan-wook, Hwang Jo-yun, and Lim Jun-hyung, the entire movie is a carefully constructed puzzle, full of tense moments as you become more and more invested in the central characters and hope to see no further harm befalling them.

Min-sik is an absolute tour-de-force in the lead role, starting as a useless drunkard detained by police, becoming the traumatised prisoner, and then turning into the survivor consumed by a need for explanation and revenge. Hye-jung is very good in a role that could have easily felt too fake and contrived, and the goodness she emanates is something that reverberates through the finale, lending more impact to every plot development that feels like a very hard slap in the face. Yoo Ji-tae is suitably conniving and confident as the main figure taking his amusement in working the main character like a puppet. That's not a spoiler. The reveal of who is ultimately responsible for such prolonged imprisonment and torture is not really a big deal once it becomes clear that the main question to ask is why? The other main actors worth mentioning are Kim Byeong-ok, playing a bodyguard to Ji-tae's character, and Oh Dal-su as an employee who oversaw the day to day running of the prison.

But it's hard to deny that this is Chan-wook's film all the way. He may have gathered up some great players, drawing what may well remain a career-best turn from Min-sik, but his attention to detail, his audacity in the execution of the material, and the choices made while leading viewers to what I consider to be one of the best third act reveals of all time, while also leaving enough ambiguity for everyone to provide their own interpretations, all come together to make this his masterpiece (and that is despite stiff competition from the likes of Thirst and The Handmaiden).

If you can only ever see one Park Chan-wook film then make it this trilogy. Because you cannot JUST see one Park Chan-wook film. You should see them all. This is his best film, but it's all the better because of it also being the central point between two other damn fine movies.

10/10

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Mubi Monday: Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance (2002)

Despite this not being his first film, and despite Joint Security Area getting a fair amount of appreciation when it was released, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance is essentially where it all began for Park Chan-wook. Or rather, to be fair, this film helped to establish his reputation, and it was then one that a lot of people revisited after being stunned by the brilliance of Oldboy.

The first part of his Vengeance Trilogy (this, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance), Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance is the least bombastic of the three films, a quiet start to what would become an essential touchstone for fans of South Korean cinema.

Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) is the main character, a deaf-mute factory worker trying to make enough money to pay for a kidney transplant that his sister desperately needs. Ryu ends up convinced by his anarchist girlfriend, Cha Yeong-mi (Bae Doona), that their problems can be solved by a kidnapping. Unlike other kidnappers, they will look after the child and hand her back, unharmed and happy, once they have received their money. There's already a child picked, young Yu-sun (Im Ji-eun), the daughter of Park Dong-jin (Song Kang-ho), a man who is connected to the employers who so recently laid off Ryu. Things inevitably don't go to plan.

It's probably the cool thing nowadays to cite this as your favourite of the Vengeance Trilogy, to claim it's the best one before Chan-wook got distracted by cinematic tricks and stylistic flourishes. It certainly remains an impressively unique and small-scale crime drama, showing someone engaged in a crime who isn't really a bad person. Not really. In a sequence of events you could easily describe as neo-noirish, Ryu is led into this plan by a "femme fatale", finds himself quickly out of his depth, and has no one he can turn to as he tries to tidy things up, leading to a third act full of danger and death.

Chan-wook knows the genre elements well enough, and allows them to feel fresh thanks to the central characters. Ryu is the sort of selfless and caring figure that will actually give up one of his own organs to help a loved one, except his blood type doesn't match, so it's quite heartbreaking to see things unravel in a way that we know is unlikely to end well for anyone involved.

Ha-kyun is great in the lead role, authentic and sweet without overplaying anything. Doona works well alongside him. They're mismatched, but also believable. Youn Ji-eun is very sweet as the girl who ends up kidnapped, and Kang-ho is a strong and menacing presence once he starts making moves to find the kidnappers in the second half of the film.

Although I still think that the next two movies supercede this one, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance is a cracking film that deserves your time. It's different from so many others you will see in this genre, and the ending lands some powerful blows, all effectively painful because of the connection you get with the main characters.

8/10

Get this while you can.