|
Page 1 of 5 Before we even get started, I need to confess that this will not be an objective piece: I happen to think that Korean auteur Chan-Wook Park is the most adept, visionary director of our generation. So this is going to be less the critical essay of his Vengeance Trilogy that I have lured you here under the pretense of, and more me taking a hot steaming load of Ramen right in the face. I can’t help it: the three films, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance affect me in a way that few others can, and transcend being foreign cinema and are just simply fanfuckingtastic movies. Most film fans even slightly left of casual are familiar with Oldboy, but not the other two, so I am here to convert the geeks along with the plebes. Ready? Cool.
Park was already an established filmmaker in South Korea by the time he made Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in 2002, the original title of which was The Revenge is Mine (so when you hear him mention that in the interview on the Oldboy disc, you’ll know what he means), and he is such an earnest soul that you will feel his pain on the Sympathy commentary when he relates how miserably it failed at the box office. Ironically, all of the reasons it failed are all of the reasons I love it so much.
Right off the bat, the film sets out to subvert every expectation you have. The second scene in the film is of a group of young men having a mass masturbation while pressing their ears to their compact apartment wall, thinking they are hearing the sound of a couple fucking away like rabid beasts. But as the camera tracks along across the dividing wall, we see that it is actually a very sick young woman in throes of agony as her one functioning kidney begins to fail. The camera then continues to track over the shoulder of another young man, main character Ryu, as he nonchalantly eats his ramen. You see, Ryu is deaf and dumb, and while his fierce love for his sister (some would even say it verges on inappropriate) is the driving force behind much of the tragic events of the film, he literally has no earthly idea that she is wailing in torment behind him.
| Now enter Ryu’s fully sense-enabled girlfriend, wannabe anarchist Young-Mi, who comes up with the brilliant idea of kidnapping Ryu’s former boss’s daughter (Ryu was recently unceremoniously down-sized) for enough ransom to pay for his sister’s much needed kidney transplant, after Ryu’s life-savings, as well as one of his own kidneys, was stolen by a gang of black market organeers. She explain to him in a hilarious scene how there are good kidnappings, and bad kidnappings, how the family will be so much closer after they get the kid back, because they will know the pain of separation. She further explains that kidnappers get a bad rap because the only time you hear about them is when something goes wrong. If the parents offer the ransom and the kid is returned, then no one ever knows about. So since the only kidnappings you ever hear about are the ones that went wrong, all kidnappers are viewed as evil. In a way, it is a compelling explanation. And, of course, Ryu has very little other choice. His sister will die without the kidney that has become available. |  |
|
Something I forgot about the quality of the writing itself. Really nice
