Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance
SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE (Park Chan-Wook, 2002)
* (Has redeeming facet)
Park Chan-Wook musters vengeance but he can't manage to create tragedy. Thus, we're left with a juvenile film that contains some breathtaking compositions (mostly in the first half) and some tediously graphic but undisturbing violence (most of the second half). Still, the film's conclusion lingers with me.
SPOILER ALERT: The following will deal almost entirely with the absolute end of the film.
Briefly summarizing...the film's aggressively unlikable female lead is assumed to be a poseur of a revolutionary. Her seemingly delusional promise to the film's second Mr. Vengeance that her death at his hands will be avenged by her fellow revolutionaries brings something approaching poignancy to a scene of torture. Turns out, at film's end that she was telling him the truth and her heretofore off-camera comrades show up out of nowhere to avenge her death. Their arrival is staged after the Coens. It is obvious they are who she said they'd be. Park still replays her promise of vengeance in voiceover.
I do not think this is because he thinks it's unclear who is committing the film's final act of violence. I think it's extremely important to Park that Yeong-mi was being honest when she told her torturer that he would killed in retribution for killing her. I believe Park thinks he is making a moral point--either that violence underpinned by honesty contains a germ of fairness or that we rationalize our destructive actions from a germ of honest, straight-forward interpersonal exchanges. I can't decide if Park is horribly misguided or plain horrible, and, despite concluding an intermittently interesting but essentially marginal film, I haven't been able to stop thinking about the import I imagine that voiceover has for him.
* (Has redeeming facet)
Park Chan-Wook musters vengeance but he can't manage to create tragedy. Thus, we're left with a juvenile film that contains some breathtaking compositions (mostly in the first half) and some tediously graphic but undisturbing violence (most of the second half). Still, the film's conclusion lingers with me.
SPOILER ALERT: The following will deal almost entirely with the absolute end of the film.
Briefly summarizing...the film's aggressively unlikable female lead is assumed to be a poseur of a revolutionary. Her seemingly delusional promise to the film's second Mr. Vengeance that her death at his hands will be avenged by her fellow revolutionaries brings something approaching poignancy to a scene of torture. Turns out, at film's end that she was telling him the truth and her heretofore off-camera comrades show up out of nowhere to avenge her death. Their arrival is staged after the Coens. It is obvious they are who she said they'd be. Park still replays her promise of vengeance in voiceover.
I do not think this is because he thinks it's unclear who is committing the film's final act of violence. I think it's extremely important to Park that Yeong-mi was being honest when she told her torturer that he would killed in retribution for killing her. I believe Park thinks he is making a moral point--either that violence underpinned by honesty contains a germ of fairness or that we rationalize our destructive actions from a germ of honest, straight-forward interpersonal exchanges. I can't decide if Park is horribly misguided or plain horrible, and, despite concluding an intermittently interesting but essentially marginal film, I haven't been able to stop thinking about the import I imagine that voiceover has for him.
Labels: park chan-wook, sympathy for mr vengeance
posted by Bret LaGree at 14:13
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