A Surreal Satisfaction to Close Out The Revenge Trilogy
And with that, I have finally finished Park Chan-wook’s infamous Revenge Trilogy. Started in 2002 with Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (복수는 나의 것), continued with Oldboy in 2003 and ended with 2005’s Lady Vengeance (친절한 금자씨), this triad is pretty much a cornerstone of Korean cinema. The middle of the three films is the most well-known, partly because it got a remake in Hollywood (le sigh) and partly because it is NOT a film you can un-know. Oldboy, more like oh boy, am I right? Anyone? Fine, suit yourselves. It is possibly the most intense film I’ve ever seen, one where a man really eating an octopus (there were 4 takes- yikes) is a mere palette cleanser in the opening act. The end side-swiped me and my then-housemate so much that we had to watch an episode of the I.T Crowd afterwards.
This is the first of the trilogy that I watched, though given that these films are linked by themes rather than storyline, this was no great issue. I can’t honestly remember when I watched Mr Vengeance, but it too was full-on, if not quite as overwhelming an experience as its successor. And then, finally, last night I got around to Lady Vengeance, the final act of this laugh-a-minute gag-a-thon. This is a joke- these movies are not funny. But what they lack in people slipping on bananas, they more than make up for in artistry, depth and impact.
The closing film of Park’s trilogy follows the story of a woman wrongfully imprisoned for child murder (told you- not funny) who, upon release, sets out for a reasonable conversation with the man who betrayed her. Nah, jk, she’s gonna get ‘im. As I said, this places the film in the same retributive ball park as Mr Vengeance, where both protagonists are seeking revenge, one against thieves who stole his kidney and the other against the first man, and Oldboy, where a man is given 5 days to find out why he was imprisoned for 15 years. Lady’s protagonist, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), is possibly the most, for want of a better word, innocent among all three films’ central characters, though I use this word with hesitation as she did still aid in the kidnapping of the child she was eventually accused of murdering. But, in terms of bloodshed and innocent people dead, this film has the least speckled scoresheet.
In their excellent video on the trilogy, while focussing mostly on Mr Vengeance, Spikima Movies posits that Lady Vengeance has the motivation of salvation at its core. As opposed to Mr Vengeance’s anger or Oldboy’s freedom, this is ultimately the most selfless of the three ideals, which ties in with the smaller amount of violence in the film. Not the absence, just the smaller amount. Don’t you worry, there will be blood. Spikima also argues that the dominant style of Lady Vengeance is surrealism (the first movie is realism whilst the second is absurdism), which, of course, prompted me to google what the difference is between being surreal and absurd. How depressing it is?
OK, I’m back from reading one Reddit thread for about two minutes. Apparently, the surreal is about distorting reality, whereas absurdism is about the meaning of life. One guy is painting a melting clock because fuck it clocks are boring and the other guy is waiting for a friend that will never come because nothing means anything. I see. This certainly does chime with both the narrative and visual elements of Lady Vengeance. It’s not full Alice in Wonderland trippy in any sense, but there are lots of unusually composed shots, along with storylines that definitely warp expectations of human behaviour.
The cinematography, surreal as it sometimes is, is uniformly stunning. The framing is always clever, from the first shot where we meet Geum-ja, slowly approaching the front and centre of the frame from behind a small crowd, to the sweeping overheads of her climbing steep city steps, or her standing off-centre, almost in the corner, of a jazzily-wallpapered bathroom towards the movie’s close. There are multiple shots of her coming from background to foreground, to symbolise her rise from conforming to rebelling, along with wide angles that remind us how small her power ultimately is. I felt like she was often positioned off-centre to demonstrate her lack of self-importance, her sense of purpose beyond herself. All of these techniques stand in subtle opposition to realism.
More overtly than in the framing, the colour scheme of the film is archly obvious. If you’ve ever heard of colour theory, been introduced to the idea of a symbol (wild stuff I know), or like, heard of colours, you’ll be able to pick up on the use of red and white here. The opening credits are weaving illustrations in black, white and red, and the first people we see in the movie are dressed as Father Christmas. When Geum-ja leaves the prison at the beginning of the film, a pastor who believes she is a reformed Christian offers her a traditional slab of white tofu, which he specifically references as giving her purity and innocence in the rest of her life.
There is a lot of snow in this film, along with red rooms, red shoes, and a red eyeshadow look that I’m definitely going to try and copy. Characters in the film even question Geum-ja on this style choice: these colour choices are being acknowledged in their obviousness even within the world of the film. The surrealism comes in how frequently they are used, and how perversely fitting they are in a story that should really be messy, bleak and without matching colour swatches. Red as sin and white as innocence is a ridiculously over-simplified piece of symbolism, and it draws attention to how over-simplification works in revenge narratives. Lady Vengeance isn’t a fairy-tale, and it shows you by gauchely smearing the colours of a fairy-tale across its face.
The narrative of this film also leans into surrealism, in the literal sense that it seems beyond (sur) what could really happen. To massively spoil the end of this film (though if you couldn’t figure out that there might be some revenge in a revenge movie from a revenge trilogy, I’m not sure how to help you), Geum-ja does indeed track down the man who killed the child she was accused of murdering. But, far more than that, she captures him with the help of his abused wife, fends off two hired assassins in the process (played by the two protagonists of Mr Vengeance), and then brings him to a remote school to torture him. Beyond even this, she collects together the parents of this man’s various other child victims, shows them his snuff films of their kids (ooft) and facilitates them all collectively torturing him to death before dumping his body and having a nice piece of cake. I didn’t even add the cake bit, they actually do that.
Describing this plot sounds like someone’s fantasy of the ultimate successful vengeance. The evil-doer receives justice directly and painfully at the hands of those who suffered because of him. When watching these scenes, there was a definite sense of oddness as I thought ‘oh right, that really is what they’re doing. And it’s going well. And oh wow yeah he really is dead now. Anyone going to betray anyone else? Nope? Lovely, time for cake!’. It almost seems like an ad absurdum realisation of those jokes people make about how different horror films would be if everyone behaved normally: they’d all avoid something nasty and have a nice time.
Whilst there is absolute nastiness in the conclusion to this tale (there’s an axe, some scissors and a lot of knives), the narrative is definitively strange in actually giving the victims what they want, seemingly without consequence. There are other odd touches, such as Geum-ja’s simple love interest being unbothered by her *interesting* past and future goals, or her daughter Jenny, adopted and raised abroad, insisting on coming with her to Seoul once she knows she exists, despite knowing no Korean. In terms of simple logic, a lot of this film doesn’t make sense. Why people do things seems unclear, and results of actions seem wildly different to anything representing real life.
But fairy-tales have overly neat, otherworldly endings too. Again, I don’t think this film is a fairy-tale, but the narrative dangles questions about the nature of evil, vengeance and violence in a manner that does almost feel like a fable. And we even have characters referred to as ‘witches’, beautiful snowy landscapes and innocent children. With all these elements together, the theme of vengeance itself becomes ethereal. The realism of Mr Vengeance leaves a messy and tragic conclusion that is emotionally unsatisfying, while the nihilism in Oldboy essentially just punches you in the face with the horror of it all. Lady Vengeance moves everything into a different realm, one that is sometimes fantastical and at once disturbing. In a way, having a trilogy like this end with definitively complete revenge is only fitting: it might feel untidy to have ended it differently. But, cleverly, Lady Vengeance makes sure to make this satisfaction as eerie and uncanny as possible.
If there is satisfaction in Park Chan-wook’s universe, it is an alien, weird concept, because it implies a solution, or perhaps completeness, to revenge. And, as these films show, it is far too messy a thing to fit into a box and close up when you’re finished with it. If I was so inclined, I could delve more into the significance in having the salvation element of the trilogy be by far the most feminine, but I’ve already written more than I could ever manage when I was actually studying. Maybe some other time. Aside from the deep dive into the potentials of revenge and the surrealist symbolism, this film is neatly crafted and delicately played. Coming from one of the two biggest giants of Korean cinema, what more could we expect?
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