Torture, snuff movies, child murder – Lady Vengeance is, unlikely as it sounds, very much a girls’ movie.
Following the brilliantly bumbling tragicomedy of Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and the charging ferocity of Oldboy, the final instalment in Chan-wook Park’s visceral trilogy takes a feminine perspective. Wrongly convicted of a child killing, the film’s eponymous avenger emerges from jail after 13 years - plenty of time, it seems, to hatch an elaborate payback for the real murderer.
“Around 10 years ago there was a famous case in Korea,” recalls Mr. Park. “A child was kidnapped and murdered, but the real shock came when the kidnapper, a young pregnant woman, was arrested. There was national outrage.”
Any similarities to reality, however, would appear to end there. Those familiar with the outrageous ouevre of Chan-wook Park will be thrilled to learn that Lady Vengeance offers the same heightened movie universe, the same generous quota of bizarre spectacle and pulpish bloodlust as its immediate predecessors. Actor Min-sik Choi, last seen devouring a live octopus for his remarkable turn in Oldboy is here, in a vignette worthy of surrealist supreme Svankmajer, re-envisaged as a weird, living rocking horse.
Watching our wronged heroine charge through the kinetic first act, it wouldn’t be lazy to cite the Kill Bill, or indeed Lady Snowblood; Blizzard Of The Netherworld, the Japanese film that inspired Tarantino’s saga. Like Lady Snowblood, Vengeance’s Geum-ja (as played by feted Korean beauty Yeong-ae Lee) meticulously plots her revenge, endearing herself to fellow prisoners and potential co-conspirators by performing good deeds, notably the comical killing of the resident jailhouse bull-dyke, a tyrannical cannibal with a penchant for larger ladies.
“It’s funny that you mention Lady Snowblood,” explains Mr. Park. “I had read about the film for many years but it was only when we were filming scenes in Australia for Lady Vengeance that I had the chance to see it. It was too late for me to incorporate anything from that film. Unfortunately.”
Unlike the jugular-centred action of Lady Snowblood, however, Mr. Park serves his revenge cold. As Lady Vengeance progresses, the film’s dark knockabout humour and exhilarating sense of revenge fulfilment give way a diseased picture of humanity. A gruesome finale, wherein the parents of murdered children are asked to decide the fate of the man responsible, laments the futility and perpetuation of violence.
“This film is about the failure of revenge”, explains the director. “In one way her plan for revenge is successful. But it fails because no plan for revenge can be completely successful. Revenge can be cathartic but it can’t offer salvation.”
The casting of Yeong-ae Lee would prove crucial to Park’s thesis. Having previously worked with the director on the massively successful Joint Security Area back in 2000, Ms. Lee has since become South Korea’s sweetheart as the frail protagonist in A Jewel In The Palace, a popular weepy TV drama. Bizarrely, when not glowering or dispatching enemies in Lady Vengeance, she can be seen praying in her pyjamas and baking cakes.
“There’s a saying in Korea that once a woman is out for vengeance snow can even fall in June, but I wasn’t casting Yeong-ae in a different role for shock value,” insists Mr. Park. “I didn’t use a female lead because women are more vengeful but because they are less so. I like that Yeong-ae’s image is very innocent and sweet and needed those qualities for the character, to feel what she was doing.”
Like many films spawned by the Korean new wave, Lady Vengeance is unflinching in its depiction of violence. Many commentators attribute such cinematic brutality to Korea’s traumatic recent history. Hostilities between North and South still simmer, while wounds inflicted by years of military rule have barely healed.
“It’s true that Koreans have a higher tolerance for violence,” explains Mr. Park. “Under the military we lived with violence all the time and our films will reflect that. Many of the Korean films that are released in the west are like this. But distributors don’t seem interesting in picking up other kinds of films. I don’t know why that is. I should probably be asking you.”
The notion of redemption looms large in Lady Vengeance. Creepy prison evangelists wait for Geum-ja at the prison gates, offering a huge block of tofu to symbolise her rehabilitation – the act of sin-eating reversed. The scene, played largely for humorous effect is darkly repeated in the final act, with Geum-ja pleading with her daughter to “be white.”
It’s a theme Mr. Park wishes to pursue further. “I’m writing a film about the existence of the devil,” he reveals. “I want to look at religious themes – good versus evil – but in a vampire film.”
Before that we can look forward to I Am A Cyborg, a tale of identity confusion set in a mental hospital.
“I can’t say I’ll never go back to the theme of vengeance,” admits the director. “But, for the moment three films is enough. There’s hardly any violence in my next film. It’s a comedy set in a mental institution.”
Only in South Korea…